Introducing Lamina.

Second Generation Blockchain Notarization Service.

Credits: Samuel Zeller, Unsplash

At a time where proof and validation is required for even the smallest of work, the documents and certificates in your hand are the costliest assets that you can have. Much like everything else, digitisation has its downsides, one of them being the generation of fake certificates.

There are two important cases — degrees from fake universities and fake degrees from real universities, the latter being a more troublesome and serious issue.

With increasing competition for work in every field, the need for high- end qualifications have increased considerably. After all, it’s a rat race and the rat with most qualification gets the cake! Those who do not meet the required qualifications resort to unethical means to get what they want, the most common being resorting to fake certificates.

The above instance is just one of the many frauds that exist in this domain. To prevent fraud and to verify the authenticity of documents, they are required to be notarized by a Notary Public. The Notary Public is a lawyer who is authorized to carry out certain legal formalities/activities including drawing up or validating contracts, deeds and other such legal documents. In others words, the Notary is the trusted third party who bears witness to the authenticity of the documents.

What is Notarization?

According to National Notary Association (NNA), US, notarization is the official fraud-deterrent process that assures the parties of a transaction that a document is authentic, and can be trusted. It is a three-part process, performed by a Notary Public, that includes of vetting, certifying and record-keeping.

In simple terms, when you say your document is notarized, it is the assurance that a document is authentic, that its signature is genuine, and that its signer acted without duress or intimidation, and intended the terms of the document to be in full force and effect.

The Notarization Process in India

In India, generally following documents are required for notarization:

1. An application form duly-filled for notarization/ attestation;
2. Original and photocopy of the documents;
3. Covering letter signed with attestation purposes bearing the commercial attestation documents list from the applicant’s company;
4. Covering letter signed with attestation purposes for applicant’s civil use;
5. Applicant’s and agent’s passport, original and photocopy for civil attestation purposes.

Once the documents are presented, the applicant has to verbally attest to the facts of the document and sign as a witness.

After this, the Notary Public affixes a stamp on the document.

This is how the notarization process works.

The Problem

However, this painstaking process of notarizing certificates is not without its share of problems:

1. The current system demands an unreasonable amount of money for issuing your hard earned certificates.
2. The processing time is about two weeks in the normal cases.

There are a lot of loopholes in the current system of certificate and document verification:

1. With most certificates being on paper, it is easy to duplicate them.
2. The current manual verification process is long, and surveys show that a number of recruiters in the small and medium enterprises do not bother to verify the credentials of their applicants because of the laborious process involved.

These problems have inevitably led to the diminishing credibility of our certificates and their lack of global acceptance.

Read more on Apostille here.

What is Lamina?

Lamina is a holistic blockchain notarization system by Peerfin built on top of the NEM blockchain that can notarize and audit documents in a fast, efficient and safe manner.

Lamina changes the notions about notarizations from just one-off timestamps to a more robust notarization system having proof of notarizations that are updatable, brandable, contain third party memos and verifications, and can even be transferable. The result is a dynamic notarization that can keep up with the pace of the real world.

The functionalities of Lamina cover those provided by a traditional Notary Public, with additional features of verifiability, transferability, and updatability, using NEM’s naming service, multi-signature accounts, messaging and blockchain assets (mosaic).

How does Lamina work?

• Lamina provide a Notarization account for notarisation authority.
• The document issuing party imports the document to Lamina.
• Lamina generates a unique hash with respect to the file content
• The document hash is then stored in Nem blockchain as transaction using timestamp,signature ,hash of concerned document.

Instead of making a one-off timestamp of a fingerprint of a document, Lamina combines it with the user’s account information to make a unique private key for that file. That file’s dedicated private key is used to make a hierarchical deterministic (HD) account.

After block validation, the private key is made available. Anyone with this key can verify the data.

How to Notarize a Document?

1. Upload the digital copy of the document at the source.
2. Save the notarized document and its file hash signature.

Submitting your documents to Lamina will record the state of the file, its timestamp, your name as the owner, and other co-signers to attest to the validity of the information. This information is stamped onto the blockchain and becomes irrefutable proof of ownership of the document at that point of time.

What would otherwise take two weeks now won’t even take two seconds.

How to Audit a File?

1. Select Audit file option.
2. Drop the file to be audited

The audit turns out successful if the document is valid.

Use Cases of Lamina

1. Private agreement between two parties.
2. Land Records.
3. Certificate Notarizations.

The Peerfin Factor

Data protection and privacy is numero uno on our priority list.

First, Peerfin does not read/access or store user data. Second, the user data is secured by end to end encryption, meaning your data is perfectly safe. Third, authenticity is guaranteed by cryptography SHA256 (Secure Hash Algorithm) which makes use of one way cryptographic function.

With Lamina, colleges will definitely be at an advantage when it comes to processing and verifying their student records for all purposes, ranging from scholarships to student loans.

Whether you’re looking to notarize documents safely, or verify the authenticity of documents that have been submitted to you, Lamina has the best experience in store for everyone.

Ready to decentralise? Join us.

Read more from us : Peerfin - The Hope Project