Silent Notary - a blockchain service for notarising documents

Silent Notary notarises digital files on the blockchain: it proves that a file existed at a particular moment and has not changed by a single byte since. We took the service on when it was already live, rewrote it from scratch and brought it back to the market.

Client

Ubix.Network

Industry

Blockchain, Fintech

Services

Web3 and blockchain, Frontend, Backend, Design, On-Line services, Outstaff, Web development, Analytics, Corporate systems, Web3 experience, Business consulting

Period

2021-2025

What we took on

The service was conceived at the right time: it appeared earlier than most of its analogues and quickly gained users. Then development paused, and in that time the market caught up - competitors appeared, some of them with investors behind them who kept putting money in.

We were approached with a task that sounded simple: refresh the design and spend on advertising.

Why a new design alone was not enough

We started with an analysis of the competition, and the picture did not argue for advertising. Several similar services already existed, all roughly alike, differing in details. What united them mattered more: to do anything at all you had to register. Both the person notarising the file and the person later shown the notarised file.

Spending money to advertise a product that is no different from the one next door means paying for people to compare you with a competitor. We reframed the task and presented it to the owners: not to refresh the shell, but to find what nobody else had and build the service around it. The proposal was accepted - so instead of a redesign we rewrote the service from scratch, on a current stack and with capabilities the competitors did not have.

• Remove registration from where it gets in the way.
• Give businesses a reason to notarise documents here specifically.
• Make users bring in new users themselves.
• Keep the people who came earlier: move them to the new service and show that the product is developing again.

Checking without registration

The first decision turned out to be the most important one. Anyone can check a document without creating an account: drag a file into the field in the header or paste a hash. The service calculates the fingerprint and answers - whether such a record exists, who made it and when.

The scenario then builds itself. A musician sends a track to a studio or a radio station and attaches the certificate. A writer sends a manuscript to a publisher - and attaches it too. The receiving side needs to install nothing and register nowhere: they open the check, see the confirmation and understand what is in front of them.

And they understand how it works along the way. A noticeable share of registrations came from exactly there: a person first checked someone else's document, worked out the mechanics on a live example, and only then created an account - already knowing what for.

How notarisation works

What goes into the registry is not the file but its hash - a short string that cannot be turned back into the document, but against which any copy can be verified.

This mattered beyond the technical side. When storing other people's documents came up for discussion, the company lawyers put it bluntly: other people's files on our servers mean a different user agreement, a separate security perimeter and costs that grow along with the number of clients.

The solution turned out to be elegant: the service does not need the files. The hash is calculated in the browser, and only it goes out - a fingerprint and a timestamp. The document itself stays with its owner and never leaves their computer. The legal question closed by itself, along with the cost of storage.

A certificate under the client's brand

The second find. Normally a document like this advertises the service itself. We did the opposite: the certificate is configured for the company - its logo, name, website, phone and address. Below sit the file name, the hash, the transaction number, the time and a QR code leading to the check. The mention of Silent Notary stays as small print at the bottom.

The result is that a client notarising documents promotes themselves, not us. For a business this proved a weighty argument: the certificate goes out to counterparties, and it carries their contacts.

Referral programme

The QR code on the certificate leads to the file check - and that is where the circle closes. If the person who received the document later registered and started using the service, the certificate's owner received a share: additional notarisations for a small user, bonuses in ecosystem coins on the internal account for companies.

The referral settings were managed by the user, and they turned the certificate into an acquisition channel: every notarised document going outside worked for the service.

Companies and working together

The bet was on notaries and lawyers ready to move to electronic document handling. Before that their work broadly looked like this: print out a screenshot and notarise the paper. Here the digital file itself is notarised, with no printout in between.

Companies appeared in the service: registries, folders, employees with different rights, a clear record of who uploaded a file and when. One person can run several companies and switch between them without leaving their account. Sign-in is shared with the rest of the ecosystem, so a separate registration in every service is not needed.

Storage arrived together with companies - this time with a properly drafted agreement. But it was not made mandatory: a company can use the service's storage or connect its own. In the second case the files sit with the client while the interface shows them just like the rest.

Moving the users across

A service rewritten from scratch always risks losing the people who got used to the old one. So the transition was prepared separately.

The notice was sent inside the service, through its own messaging system - under the agreement users had accepted when they registered. For those who used the service actively, the message was duplicated by email. Accounts and every notarisation made earlier moved along with the people: nothing had to be set up again.

The return was good. A person opened the service, saw the new interface, tried the check, looked into the certificate and the referral programme - and stayed. For active users the switch was seamless, and the community took the update warmly.

Tariffs and storage

Once it became clear that certificates work as an acquisition channel, notarisations stopped being paid-only: every member was given a monthly allowance that renews itself. The counter resets at the start of the month, and for most people that is enough.

A tariff is for those who go past the allowance: it lifts the limit and lets them buy the number of notarisations they need. The storage quota, the remaining notarisations and the retention period are visible right in the dashboard, and the upgrade is offered where a person runs into the limit rather than in a separate section with a price list.

Interface

Light and dark themes, each worked out separately. The Montserrat typeface, blue and lilac as accents, everything else in shades of grey. The mobile version repeats the whole path: upload, notarise, check, download the certificate.

Infrastructure

The backend runs on C# 7, auxiliary services on Node.js 16+, storage on PostgreSQL. Notarisations are processed asynchronously: a request goes into a queue instead of holding the user, so a batch of files does not slow the interface down.

Silent Notary blockchain service stack

• Vue.js
• Quasar
• C# 7
• Node.js 16+
• PostgreSQL