Four people ask
whether you made it.
Your bench can answer for a piece it is holding. Every one of those four questions is about a piece it is not.
Jewelry, watches and luxury — brand protection, and whoever answers the client.
Verified 6 August 2026. The spine behind this page passes 1031/1031 conformance tests against GS1's normative artifacts, and its translate, validate and hash doors are live at epcis.dev. The dated built-and-tested summary is at What ships today.
A watch comes back for service and the service book has a gap in it. A platform overseas lists one and wants a document before it will take the commission. An insurer wants a claim substantiated, and a customs officer wants a declaration matched to the object on the table. Four askers, four vocabularies, one question — and all four of them end in the same place, which is a certificate. A certificate is a document about the piece. It travels in an envelope, it is not the piece’s record, and it copies exactly as easily as the digits do, because both of them are only characters.
The archive is real. The serial book goes back further than most companies keep anything at all, the bench can tell a re-cased movement from an original in an afternoon, and the people who do that are not going to be replaced by software. None of it is in question here. What a house can do is authenticate a piece it has. What no house can do is hand a stranger something that settles the question without it.
What it costs you.
A copy carries the same digits. The number on your product identifies a kind of product; it was never able to identify that one. So the claim you actually need to make about a specific piece — it is ours, it was finished in that workshop, it left our hands and it has not left the chain since — has nothing underneath it.
All four of them stop at the same wall, which is that nothing distinguishes the object in front of them from a faithful copy of it — because nothing about the original was ever recorded about the original. The archive knows the reference, the caliber and the year it was made. What it has no row for is this piece, moving, on the days it moved, and that row is what every one of those four questions is actually asking to see.
Arithmetic the other side runs without you.
The standard defines one way to compute an event’s identity from its content — CBV 2.0 §8.9, GS1’s algorithm and not ours. Post any event twice and the identity is the same. Change one character anywhere in it and it is not. Run it on your own document; no key, no account, and the value does not depend on us being honest.
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Post the event. Then post it again, unchanged:
$ curl -sX POST https://epcis.dev/hash \ -H 'content-type: application/json' -d @handoff.json ni:///sha-256;3a2abe05…a7e7d?ver=CBV2.0 ni:///sha-256;3a2abe05…a7e7d?ver=CBV2.0
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Change one character — a reference, a digit, a timestamp — and post it once more:
$ curl -sX POST https://epcis.dev/hash \ -H 'content-type: application/json' -d @edited.json ni:///sha-256;7f906195…fc55e?ver=CBV2.0
What changes.
visibility.cloud will give the individual piece an identity of its own and a chain of hands behind it: every handoff an event with an attested observer, identified by the standard’s own content hash (CBV 2.0 §8.9), append-only by construction, and readable by the other side without them joining anything of ours. The hosted chain those hashes hang on answers at api.epcis.dev to a capture key today, and issuing those keys is not open yet; the spine underneath it has no update path and no delete path at all — a correction is a new event, never an edit — and the append-only tests that hold that line pass today.
What this is not. It will not be an anti-counterfeit feature and it will not make a copy detectable in the hand. Whatever is printed on the item can be printed again. What becomes checkable is the claim: a piece will either have a custody chain that resolves and recomputes, or it will not — and that difference is arithmetic the other side runs for themselves, on the same §8.9 hash epcis.dev/hash computes today. No figure about counterfeiting appears on this page, because we hold none we can show you.
The answer products this read lands on — the trace, the custody evidence pack, the exception view — each carry a named entry in this page, and the answers page names which. What you can exercise today is on this page’s buildline.
Before you take this to a meeting.
4 things a reader who knows this field would stop and correct. Several of them cost us the thing this category is usually sold on, which is why they are on the page and not in a footnote.
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01
The hash identifies the event, not the object. It proves a record has not been edited since it was written. It says nothing about whether the object in the photograph is the object in the event.
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02
A chain that resolves proves custody was recorded, not that it was recorded honestly. What it removes is the ability to write the record afterward, once the answer is known.
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03
Anything printed on an item can be printed again. Nothing here changes that, and any vendor who tells you otherwise is selling you the part they cannot do.
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04
§8.9 is GS1’s algorithm, not ours. That is the point — the counterparty computes the same value from the same bytes without using our door and without trusting us. GS1 has not reviewed, certified or approved this platform.
One place to point your agents.
An agent buying from you has to show whose money it is spending and under what limit. An agent working inside your plant has to show whose authority it holds and which task it was asked to perform. Those are the same question, asked from opposite sides of the same door.
Your agents will reason over anything you hand them. What they get handed is fourteen systems, a credential each, and no two of them describing the same object the same way.
visibility.cloud will onboard those sources as one surface: modern SaaS platforms through their own APIs, Apache Iceberg lakes read and written in both directions, the EDI mailbox that has been running since before anyone there was hired, and the print, scan and read events coming off the floor — landing as one event record with an attested observer on it, at the grain a question is actually asked at.
Then the agents get one secure place to explore it, under a seat with a written mandate: scope named, ceiling named, every read evaluated against the same grants every human read is. The point is not a chat window over a warehouse. It is that the answer comes back actionable — a bounded set of cases, a named handoff, a specific gap — instead of an integration project per source.
Neither the sandbox nor the seat mandate it runs under is built, and What ships today says so. What is live today is the machine face this surface already publishes: /llms.txt, /icp.json, /agent-classes.json, /flow.json and /variants.json, plus the markdown twin of this page on this same route.
What this read stands on.
No counterfeit rate, market size or resale figure is cited here, because none is held that can be shown. Every claim on this read is a checkable property of a record.
The other three bills.
One defect, four costs. If the one above is not yours, one of these is.
- RecallOne run went bad and you withdrew everything it could have been in. Food CPG and QSR — whoever owns the recall desk.
- ShrinkEvery unit was scanned, and the investigation still ends at “seen here, then not.” Apparel and general merchandise — loss prevention, and the fulfillment side that owns the dock it happens on.
- The discarded scanThe lane reads the serial, the lot and the expiry, and keeps none of them. Retailers and brands on the Sunrise 2027 timeline.
See your first trace.
Capture workspaces for manufacturers and brands are provisioned from the seat list — we write when your seat is ready.