What's in a Certificate of Verification
A Certificate of Verification (COV) is the sealed result of an IronMarket verification visit. It names the asset, records what the agent saw, and carries the cryptographic proof that the record hasn't been changed since.
What a certificate shows
- Certificate code. The public code anyone can use to check it.
- Asset. Description, make and model, and the serial number, VIN or PIN.
- Hours or miles recorded at the visit, where the asset has a meter.
- Units covered. One asset, or the item count for a Lot.
- Witnessed by. The agent who made the visit.
- Issued and current until. When it was sealed and how long it stays current.
- Verification results. Whether the signature, ledger link and timestamp all check out.
The photos, video and recorded answers from the visit belong to the record. Each media file is fingerprinted, and those fingerprints are part of what gets signed, so a swapped or edited photo would no longer match.
A printable PDF of each certificate, with a QR code that opens its verification page, is available from the result page.
Check one now
Enter the code printed on a certificate at ironmarket.com/verify. The page re-runs every check each time you look.
How a certificate is protected
Digital signature
The record is signed with an Ed25519 key when it is sealed. Changing one character of the record breaks the signature. The public key is published at /verify/pubkey, so anyone can check a signature with standard tools.
Certificate ledger
Each certificate is linked to the one issued before it by a hash chain. Altering or removing an earlier certificate would break every link after it, so the whole history is tamper-evident.
Independent timestamp
An outside RFC 3161 time-stamp authority confirms when the record was sealed. The date doesn't depend on IronMarket's own clock.
Current, renewed and transferred
The certificate is a permanent record of the visit. It is marked current for 6 or 12 months, depending on how quickly the asset's condition tends to change. Renewing it adds a new dated layer to the same certificate, so a lender or buyer can see the asset's history of check-ins.
When the asset is sold, the certificate can be transferred to the new owner's IronMarket account and keeps its history.
Kept private by default
The owner decides who gets the code or a shared link. Certificate result pages are kept out of search engines.
Common questions
Related
Get your equipment on record
Choose Basic, Expert or Lot and tell us where the asset is. A coordinator schedules a certified agent to it.
