Introducing ProvenDB for Docusign
ProvenDB for Docusign allows you to easily anchor your DocuSign documents to a public blockchain, providing independent and irrefutable proof of document provenance.
The Digitisation of Everything has been underway now for decades. Music and video are almost exclusively consumed in digital formats, and e-books now challenge paper books for dominance. During the COVID–19 epidemic, even our personal interactions became digitised as face-to-face meetings were replaced by Zoom and Microsoft teams calls.
The digitisation of business documents — the long-promised “paperless office” — has also been accelerating. Again, Covid has quickened the process: when office workers were forced to work from home, paper documentation became impractical, and the paperless office became real.
Electronic signatures are an important part of the paperless office. The ability for multiple parties to sign contracts and agreements without the need to transfer physical paper has obvious productivity benefits. Electronic signing services such as DocuSign are consequently increasingly popular.
Electronic signing services serve as a sort of signature witness. If you have signed a DocuSign document, essentially you have the DocuSign company attesting to the veracity of the document and the identity of the signees. However, this falls somewhat short of the ideal for a digital proof.
While it may be unlikely that an e-signature vendor such as DocuSign might be involved in a deliberate effort to falsify documents, it is by no means impossible for a DocuSign document to be forged. We’ve seen on many occasions that even when insiders within an organisation behave in a trustworthy manner, hackers are still able to penetrate and manipulate systems by acquiring the privileged insider’s credentials. For instance, in the Carbanak hack, attackers gained access to database administration credentials that allowed them to inflate bank balances within otherwise secure databases. Similarly, it’s all too possible to envisage a hacker being able to break into an e-signature vendor and falsify a document record.
As well as the possibility of document fabrication or falsification, we also should be concerned about the long-term viability of the document attestations. Companies such as DocuSign are very healthy at the moment, but for all we know, it might become non-viable in the future. In many cases, we need to know that our documents can be proved without doubt many decades into the future, and reliance on a third-party company works against this objective.
Ideally, our critical digital documents would be anchored directly to a public Blockchain. The public Blockchain record could then stand as an immutable and enduring proof of the integrity of the document.
This is what we’ve done with ProvenDB for Docusign. By simply adding your unique ProvenDB email address to the DocuSign workflow, you can create a Blockchain proof of the signed document on either Ethereum or Hedera Blockchains. These proofs can be used to prove the provenance and ownership of your signed documents, without reference to DocuSign and indeed without reference even to ProvenDB. The proof is completely independent and relies only on the existence of the Blockchain.
How it works
When you sign up for a free ProvenDB for Docusign account you are allocated a unique email address:
Add this address to the “receives a copy” recipient:
When all parties have signed the document, the completed document will be stored within your ProvenDB “vault”, and the proof emailed to you. You can view this proof in your provenDB account, or you can simply take the proof that was mailed to you and store it somewhere safe. The proof is a completely self-contained, blockchain proof that attests to your documents contents and creation date.
You could conceivably put this proof on a thumb drive and bury it in the backyard and 20 years later — providing the Ethereum Blockchain is still around (a pretty safe bet, given the 30 billion dollars of assets stored on the chain) — you could prove ownership and provenance of the document even if ProvenDB and Docusign were no more (hopefully not, but really who knows?).
For a limited time, we are offering unlimited proofs for Docusign documents on our free account. Next year we’ll transition to a $15/month subscription for unlimited documents and five documents per month on the free account.
We think that Blockchain proofs and electronic signatures are a match made in heaven — try out ProvenDB for Docusign today and see for yourself.
ProvenDB for DocuSign allows you to create blockchain-based digital proofs of your DocuSign envelopes. These proofs attest to the township, integrity and provenance of you documents, are completely immune from tampering or falsification and are independent of any third party. Try ProvenDB for DocuSign for free today.
