Certificates of authenticity for paintings
A painting's value rests on two things: that it is genuinely by the artist named, and that its history holds together. Attesian gives a painting both — a signed certificate of authenticity and an append-only provenance record that starts the moment you register the work.
Register a painting, add a photograph, and the system mints the work's genesis event and issues a certificate with its own QR code. Anyone — a buyer, a gallery, an auction house — can scan it and confirm the work and its history in seconds, with no account.
The genesis event records you as the maker at the very start, before the work changes hands.
Exhibitions, sales, and owners are added over time, building an unbroken chain of custody.
Corrections are visible additions, so the record stays trustworthy without ever being rewritten.
How image fingerprinting applies
A painting is flat, so the certificate's perceptual image fingerprint is at its strongest here: it ties the certificate to a specific photograph of the surface and detects if that image is swapped. It is a work-level fingerprint, not a substitute for seeing the piece.
Questions
- Is an Attesian certificate better than a letter on gallery paper?
- Yes. A paper letter is easy to lose and impossible to check remotely. An Attesian certificate is signed, carries a QR code, and can be verified by anyone in seconds — and it belongs to you, not the gallery.
- What if the painting is sold years later?
- The certificate and provenance travel with the work. A future buyer scans the same QR code and sees the full, tamper-evident history, including every owner and exhibition recorded along the way.