Anchoring

EBSI provides two complementary anchoring mechanisms. Choose the one that fits your use case.

Timestamp

Anchor a cryptographic hash on the EBSI blockchain to prove that a piece of data existed at a specific point in time.

Track and Trace

Record a tamper-evident chain of lifecycle events for a document — track versions, transfers, and status changes over time.

Comparison

	Timestamp	Track and Trace (TnT)
Purpose	Anchor a hash at a single point in time	Track the full lifecycle and version history of a document
When to use	Proving data existed at a specific moment	Tracing provenance, versions, and events over time
Guide	Create a Timestamp	Create a TnT Doc

Signing and submitting transactions

Both guides write to the EBSI ledger, and every write follows the same three-step pattern. The relevant JSON-RPC method (for example timestampHashes or createDocument) does not write directly: it returns an unsigned Ethereum transaction. You then:

1. Sign the transaction locally with your legal entity's key.
2. Submit it with the sendSignedTransaction JSON-RPC method, which broadcasts it through the Ledger API and returns a transaction hash.
3. Poll the Ledger API's eth_getTransactionReceipt method until the receipt is available — transactions take a few seconds to be mined. Check the receipt's status field: 0x1 means success, 0x0 means the transaction failed (the revertReason field explains why).

Read operations (listing or fetching timestamps, records, documents, events, and accesses) are public REST calls: they need neither an access token nor a signature.