Apparat

A Data Fidelity Register is a set of an organisation’s facts, each one bound to its public source and sealed so it can be checked.

Below is a single entry, shown to make the shape plain. A register is many of these, published together on the organisation’s own domain.

Fact
Revenue: €988.8 million
Period
Financial year 2024
Source
Believe — annual results release, 13 March 2025 (the published document)
Context
Believe reported full-year revenue of €988.8 million for 2024…” — quoted verbatim from the source
Seal
8bc8c04caf29999a681b15683f4b8821b2d65cd32c104f605f9eb5aeec2c471b

The company name is masked here; this entry illustrates the structure, not a live record. The seal is a SHA-256 fingerprint over the fact’s six fields, so any later change to the value, the period, the quote or the source is detectable. Every fact in a register carries one.

The facts in a release are sealed together, and the release itself is anchored so the whole set is tamper-evident:

Commitment
27f0741b7233a85c7ab7159830546b9d41bb9c792226c46c867a8fc19e47300c
Anchored in
Sigstore Rekor, a public append-only transparency log Apparat does not control, entry 2749190009

The individual seals are combined into a single fingerprint, the release commitment, using a Merkle tree, and that commitment is signed and entered in a public log. Anyone can confirm the entry exists in the log independently of Apparat. This is what lets a register be trusted without trusting us.

To see a real register in full, with every fact, its source and its seal, and to check it for yourself:

Open a live register

Specification

The format is an open specification, published under CC BY 4.0 with a citable DOI. Read it on GitHub.

Verifier

An open-source reference verifier (MIT) recomputes every seal, the release commitment and the public-log entry, so a register can be checked without trusting Apparat. Get the verifier.

Standards

The register is positioned relative to the IETF’s SCITT transparency standard (RFC 9943), which draws the same line the register does: a signed, logged statement is proven recorded, not proven true. The specification sets out the alignment.

Apparat builds and operates Data Fidelity Registers for organisations. If getting your public facts right matters, start with a short conversation about what your register could cover.

Start a conversation