1 Executive Summary
Suppose every reading, estimate, approval and handoff is signed and attested with a personal key, as it is made. An invoice arrives with its deliveries already agreed. A payment or an approval follows the evidence the moment it arrives, because the other side already holds it. The content behind each entry stays encrypted and readable only by those the parties allow. Software the parties allow can act on that content as soon as the evidence meets its rules, with no person checking each step again. Nothing waits for reconciliation. There is nothing left to reconstruct. This is in essence, the promise of enterprise blockchain technology.
A blockchain agrees on each entry at the moment of writing, by a round of votes among its members. Every member must therefore have built and paid for its system before the first entry is worth writing, and every entry afterwards runs through that round. This prerequisite proved to be an obstacle to B3i, a consortium of insurers which closed in 2022. The chief executive of Swiss Re, a member, put it this way: “it would need all insurance companies to basically create smart contracts at the beginning” (Howard 2022). Everyone had to join before anything worked. With EventChain, one company starts recording on its own. The others take a copy when they need it. TradeLens wanted to connect ten ocean carriers. But rivals objected to putting their data on a platform that a competitor controlled (Hill 2018; United Nations ESCAP 2025) an couldn’t get off the ground. The agreement needs a place to happen, and at TradeLens that place belonged to a rival. With EventChain, each party checks its own copy. The service that distributes the history, the Hub, never sees what any document says. In 2022 ASX wrote off A$245–255 million. An independent review found little value in running all the business logic on a blockchain, because ASX already maintained the data’s integrity (Accenture 2022; ASX Limited 2022). Every entry waited for an agreement ASX did not need. In EventChain an entry costs one signature from whoever produced the event, and one write on a simple plaintext file. The signature is the approval or the reading itself. Energinet designed its energy-certificate system to combine millions of certificates into a single blockchain entry, citing the blockchain’s limited scalability and its cost (Energinet 2023). When every entry costs everyone’s agreement, readings come in bundles. This substantially reduced costs but introduced a trade-off: certificates could only be independently verified against the blockchain after their batch had been committed. In EventChain each reading can be its own entry. EventChain exists to give different interested parties the certainty that every one of them holds the same history, at the speed and cost of a traditional message queue. It records first and agrees afterwards. Every holder compares its copy with a one line history hash that the Hub signs and publishes. This paper proposes that an independent foundation appoint hosts to these hashes as a neutral, trusted third party (Section 5.1). This third party comparison mechanism gives the certainty the published histories are the same for every holder. This paper calls the result consensus by comparison (Chapter 3). The mechanism is in Chapter 4.
The art-registration service ascribe recorded on its farewell page that a marketplace weighing its service registered 100,000 photos a day, as many transactions as the whole Bitcoin network then handled, and that each photo needed its own provenance entry (ascribe team, n.d.). EventChain now makes provenance at scale fast, simple and affordable. What becomes worth building is everything a blockchain made too expensive or too slow to record. You can find five worked examples with these requirements. An electricity supplier can send each fifteen-minute reading the meter’s key signed. The customer recomputes the total themselves. An insurer and its policyholder can hold every estimate and revision behind a claim. A dispute then starts from evidence both already hold. An enterprise that hands confidential documents to an AI supplier can keep the supplier’s signed acknowledgment of each document version and the terms of its use. A lender can keep both valuations behind a mortgage approval. A later reviewer sees which one the approval relied on. A buyer of an aircraft part can check the signatures of the maker and each handler against registered keys before fitting it. Buyers once accepted forged paper certificates for such parts (Serious Fraud Office 2026).
A valid chain shows which key signed what, and in what order. The chain cannot show whether a statement was true. The party bound to the signing key answers for that (Section 3.3). The history records the approval or the transfer. Whatever moves the money or the title acts on that evidence, in the application or blockchain built for it (Section 3.5). The place to start is the process where waiting for reconciliation costs you most. The first entry is useful the day someone signs it. Nobody else has to agree first.