What is Digital Provenance Technology?
Digital Provenance Technology™ (DPT™) is Cerfinity's method for binding a physical product to a permanent, verifiable record of its origin and handling. Each item receives a tamper-evident seal carrying a unique cryptographic identity that cannot be cloned or transferred to another unit. Every meaningful event — manufacture, packing, shipment, retail intake, first opening — is written to a provenance ledger tied to that identity. Anyone holding the product can read that record instantly with a smartphone, which turns authenticity from a claim into evidence.
How does NFC product authentication work?
An NFC (near-field communication) seal contains a secure chip that generates a fresh, single-use cryptographic response every time it is tapped. A customer taps the product with a phone; the phone reads that response and sends it to Cerfinity, which checks it against the item's record in the provenance ledger. A genuine chip produces a valid, never-before-used response, so a photographed, printed, or copied tag fails immediately. The whole check takes roughly a second and requires no app download.
What is a tamper-evident provenance seal?
A tamper-evident provenance seal is a physical seal — applied across a closure, box flap, or bottle neck — that carries the product's digital identity and is destroyed by opening. The seal's antenna or secure circuit breaks when the package is opened, so the chip's electrical signature changes permanently. Cerfinity records that change, meaning the ledger shows not only that a product is genuine but whether its packaging is still intact. Refilling, re-boxing, and returns fraud all become detectable.
How does Cerfinity prove chain of custody?
Chain of custody is the unbroken, ordered record of who handled a product and when, from production to the end customer. Cerfinity captures a signed entry at each authorized checkpoint — the producer, the distributor, the logistics partner, the retailer — and appends it to that specific item's provenance record. Because entries are append-only and time-stamped, gaps and out-of-sequence scans stand out rather than being quietly overwritten. Brands see the full history; consumers see a plain-language summary of where the item has been.
What is first-opening detection?
First-opening detection tells you whether you are the first person to open a product. The provenance seal registers an irreversible state change the moment the package is broken, and the ledger records the time and place of that event. If a customer taps a product and the record already shows a prior opening, the item was opened somewhere in the supply chain or by a previous holder. For pharmaceuticals, spirits, cosmetics, and collectibles, this is often more valuable than authenticity alone.
Which product categories does Cerfinity protect?
Cerfinity protects any category where authenticity, origin, or package integrity carries real financial or safety value. Current deployments and programs cover spirits and distilleries, wine, luxury fashion and leather goods, graded collectibles and sports memorabilia, specialty food including coffee, cacao, chocolate, tea and honey, pharmaceuticals, prestige cosmetics and skincare, and consumer electronics and components. Agriculture and plant-genetics supply chains are supported through the same provenance model. The seal format changes by category; the underlying provenance record does not.
How does Cerfinity support EU Digital Product Passport compliance?
The EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) requires many products sold in the European Union to carry a machine-readable data carrier linking to structured information about origin, composition, and lifecycle. Cerfinity already issues a per-item data carrier and maintains a persistent, queryable record behind it, which is the hard part of DPP readiness. Brands map their required DPP attributes onto the existing item record and expose them through the same tap or scan. The result is one seal that serves consumer authentication, supply-chain traceability, and regulatory disclosure — including EUDR and FSMA Rule 204 traceability needs.