Verifiable Company Records
When any document can be generated by AI, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish real from synthetic content. Stuff.io gives businesses the ability to preserve files and documents with cryptographic verification, tamper detection, controlled access, and independently provable authenticity.
Used today for board minutes, M&A deal rooms, IP filings, clinical trial records, audit work papers, and regulatory submissions.
Anatomy of a DEA
01
Cryptographic write-once integrity. Stronger than WORM appliances — and verifiable by any third party without trusting the vendor.
02
Documents are sharded and encrypted before they leave your environment. Only holders of authorized signatures can reconstruct and decrypt.
03
Every mint, signer addition, decryption event, and access is recorded on-chain with a timestamp no party can forge or backdate.
Built for an adversarial AI
The records you preserve today have to survive an adversary that did not exist when most retention systems were designed. Cloud storage was built to be administered. DEAs were built to outlast administration.
Threat 01
The fear
An autonomous AI agent authenticates into your cloud storage with valid credentials and wipes it. Ransomware encrypts the file server. An automated attacker exfiltrates the data room and corrupts what it leaves behind. Cloud-based backups are caught in the same blast radius — they were always one credential away from the primary.
The DEA answer
A DEA is not stored in any cloud account you (or anyone) can sign into and empty. The encrypted shards live across a distributed storage network. The on-chain mint is permanent. There is no admin panel, no "delete all," no recovery email to phish. Records disappear only when YOU choose to destroy your own keys.
Threat 02
The fear
Generative AI produces a board minute, a contract, a clinical record, an audit work paper that is bit-for-bit indistinguishable from the real thing — complete with plausible metadata, signatures, and timestamps embedded in the file. The forgery surfaces years after the event it purports to record.
The DEA answer
A DEA carries an on-chain mint timestamp that cannot be backdated by any party. A forgery produced after the disputed event lacks the on-chain receipt that would have existed had the document been real. Authenticity collapses to a single query: did this hash mint before the event? Yes or no. Math, not testimony.
Six places this lives
Enterprise DEAs are most valuable for documents whose authenticity will be contested — in court, in audit, in front of a regulator, or by a successor who needs to know what the prior team actually decided.
General Counsel · Public companies
The problem
SOX retention rules and board-level discovery defensibility require records that cannot be altered after the fact — including by privileged insiders.
DEA fit
Minutes mint to a DEA at adoption. Any later edit produces a fork with a distinct on-chain identity. The original is provably untouched, forever.
Investment banks · Outside counsel
The problem
Cross-firm data rooms leak. Discovery in post-close disputes turns on who saw which version of which document, and when.
DEA fit
Each document is its own DEA. The decryption ledger is the data-room access log — admissible, immutable, and auditable years after close.
IP law firms · R&D-heavy operators
The problem
Prior art disputes hinge on timestamped proof of invention. Lab notebooks, design files, and provisional drafts need a chain of custody a court will accept.
DEA fit
Filings and supporting artifacts mint as DEAs. The on-chain mint timestamp is independently verifiable evidence of existence on a given date.
Pharma · Biotech · CROs
The problem
FDA 21 CFR Part 11 requires electronic records with secure audit trails. Inspections look for any chance a record could have been changed without trace.
DEA fit
Trial documents — protocols, CRFs, deviation logs — mint as DEAs. Audit trail is cryptographic, not policy-based, and survives sponsor / CRO changes.
Big Four · Internal audit teams
The problem
PCAOB inspections and internal audit committees demand work papers that cannot have been modified after issuance of the opinion.
DEA fit
Each work paper is sealed to a DEA at signoff. The chain of custody is verifiable through inspection without giving the inspector privileged access.
SEC · FDA · FINRA registrants
The problem
Regulators increasingly ask: "When was this exact file produced? Has it been touched since?" Filing systems can usually answer one of those questions.
DEA fit
Submissions mint to DEAs at file-creation. The cryptographic timestamp answers both questions in a form the regulator can verify independently.
How it works
The architecture is deliberately uninteresting in the failure mode that matters most: even a fully compromised Stuff.io cannot read, alter, or destroy a document our customers haven't already lost the keys to.
STEP 01
Document is uploaded over TLS to a single-tenant ingest endpoint. Hashing happens client-side; the plaintext never lives on our infrastructure.
STEP 02
AES-256 envelope keys wrap the payload. The encrypted blob is erasure-coded into shards and distributed across a content-addressed peer-to-peer network.
STEP 03
A DEA is minted on-chain with the document hash, shard manifest, and the multi-sig policy governing decryption. The mint timestamp is the proof.
STEP 04
Authorized signers sign a retrieval transaction. Shards reassemble; envelope keys unwrap. Every retrieval writes an on-chain access record.
Key control
Every DEA is governed by an on-chain native multi-sig policy. The policy is set at mint and visible on-chain forever. Stuff.io can be a co-signer, a minority backstop, or entirely outside the policy.
Self-custody
m-of-n · You hold every key
Your security team generates and holds all keys. Stuff.io is the rails — we cannot decrypt, alter, or recover your documents. Recommended for the most sensitive records and for buyers with mature HSM practices.
Co-signer
2-of-3 · We hold one minority key
You hold two keys; Stuff.io holds one. Retrieval requires any two. We cannot act alone, but you can recover from a single internal key loss without an emergency. The default model for most enterprise deployments.
Custodian
m-of-n · Your custodian + you + (optional) us
Bring your existing custodian — Fireblocks, Coinbase Custody, BitGo, or your in-house qualified custodian. Stuff.io can sit in the policy as a minority signer or stay out entirely. Built for regulated firms whose custody is already chosen.
AI models trained on public data will become commodities. AI models trained on proprietary data will become moats.
Access & AI isolation
Reading a DEA requires a key the policy permits. Policies are granular, revocable, time-bounded, and audit-logged on-chain. Your enterprise LLM can be a signer. Anyone else's LLM can't.
Permissioning
Every DEA carries its own on-chain access policy. Your General Counsel and outside counsel might both be in a deal-room policy; the audit committee isn't. Signers can be added or revoked without re-minting — revocations take effect on the next retrieval. Time-bounded access is policy: outside counsel's signing rights expire at close, no documents to hunt down and delete. Every retrieval, successful or denied, writes an on-chain access record. The audit committee can see who read what, and when, without asking IT.
AI isolation
Your enterprise LLM — running on Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, a self-hosted Llama, whatever already lives inside your VPC — holds a key the policy permits. When it needs to read a DEA, it signs the retrieval transaction with that key. No external model can. If a DEA were exfiltrated to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or a leaked weight file, it would remain encrypted forever. "Can we let our records into the LLM?" stops being a vendor-trust debate and becomes a key-management decision your security team already knows how to answer.
Compliance mapping
We don't ask regulators to accept a new framework. We show how DEAs meet the standard they're already enforcing, in language their inspectors already know.
SEC Rule 17a-4
FDA 21 CFR Part 11
SOX §404
HIPAA Security Rule
GDPR Article 17
Attorney-client privilege
Request access
Stuff.io Enterprise is in private deployment. Tell us the use case you're trying to defend and we'll come back with an architecture proposal and a custody plan within five business days.
