What a certificate of authenticity on a blockchain actually proves — and what it does not
Dimitri Sloboda, Founder, CoArt Market · 16 September 2026 · 4 min read
A certificate on a blockchain is often described as though it settled the question of authenticity by itself. What it really does is narrower and more useful: it holds what was recorded about an object, by whom, and on what day — permanently, and in a form nobody can quietly edit. Everything else we are building stands on that.
What the certificate is, in plain terms
When an object is approved on CoArt Market, three things happen at once.
A token is created on the Symbol blockchain — one for that object, with an identifier anyone can look up. The necklace listed as Pear Emerald & Diamond Necklace carries the identifier 063D5CA83B77EDD7, created on 15 September 2026.
Its photographs, its documents and a metadata file are written to Arweave — itself a blockchain-based storage network, where data is paid for once and then kept permanently. The object page links to them directly.
And an account is created that holds the certificate for that object, and two of three keys are needed to move it. The certificate does not sit in one person's pocket.
What Arweave holds: the object's own fingerprint
This storage is not a photo album. It is where the data taken from the object itself is kept, so that the same object can be identified again years from now, by whoever needs to.
That can include macro photography of particular areas, infrared and X-ray imaging, three-dimensional models, and whatever else a specialist takes for that kind of object: a hallmark, an old repair, a pattern of craquelure, the inside of a bezel. The marks that tell one object from a good copy of it.
Written to Arweave, that material is permanent and unalterable. It is the object's fingerprint, and it is what makes a certificate worth more than a receipt.
What the record establishes
Four things, and they are worth separating.
- That this record existed on that date. The token carries its creation time, and nobody can move it earlier.
- That these exact documents and images existed at that moment — not similar ones, these. Change one pixel and the stored copy no longer matches.
- That the seller declared specific things about the object. The declaration is recorded by its hash and by a link to a redacted public copy, so a reader can check that the document has not changed without reading a private person's details.
- Who holds the certificate now, and every hand it has passed through since it was created.
Where this is going: identification on arrival
The fingerprint makes something straightforward possible, and it is the next thing we are building.
A buyer knows which identification data their object's certificate holds. They can have the same data taken from the object that arrived — the same areas, the same imaging — and send it to be compared against what is stored in Arweave. What comes back is a degree of correspondence: this is the object this certificate describes, to this degree of confidence.
That closes the oldest gap in buying at a distance, and the certificate was designed for it from the start. It is being built now; until it runs, acceptance is the ordinary one — the buyer confirms from their own dashboard that the object arrived as described.
What the certificate leaves to people
A blockchain records; the judgment is made by specialists. What the certificate carries is their work and their documents — which is precisely what makes that work checkable years later, by someone who never met them.
Value is the same kind of question. The certificate holds no valuation and no forecast: what an object is worth is for the market and for the people who know that market.
We would rather say this plainly than let a record be mistaken for a verdict. A certificate is a memory that cannot be edited, and a memory is worth what was put into it — which is why what goes in is examined by people first.
The 10,000 fractions, and where they are going
Every certificate is created with a supply of 10,000 fractions. On a whole object they are the certificate's own arithmetic: they stay dormant and frozen, they pass to the buyer together with the object, and they are never offered, priced or sold apart from it. An object is bought and sold as one thing.
They exist because of where this is going. As CoArt Market grows we intend to obtain the financial and regulatory licences that would let those fractions be set in motion as fractional ownership of an object — shares that could change hands on a secondary market.
That is an ambition with a condition, and we state the condition: it needs licences we do not yet hold. Until then, fractional ownership on CoArt Market is what our mission describes — people acquiring a significant object together for a public purpose — and nothing here is offered as an investment.
How to check one yourself
Open any certified object on CoArt Market. Its page carries the identifier of its token and links to its documents on Arweave.
The identifier can be looked up on a public Symbol explorer, by anyone, without asking us. That is the point of putting it there: a record you have to take our word for is not a record.
A certificate is a memory that cannot be edited — and, before long, a fingerprint you can hold your own object against.