Deferred Recourse
Why €2 Today Is Enough for Evidence Activatable Tomorrow
The economic logic of evidence of anteriority
When you protect a creation — a manuscript, a design, source code, a trade secret, a commercial document — you are in fact preparing a case file for an event that may never occur. Most works are never contested. Most contracts never give rise to litigation. Most documents you anchor today will never be opposed to anyone.
Yet we protect. Why? Because in the small percentage of cases where a dispute arises, the absence of evidence of anteriority can cost infinitely more than the cost of protection.
The problem with traditional solutions
Most evidence-of-anteriority solutions require the user to pay upfront for full coverage, regardless of the probability that a dispute will arise. This is rational from the provider's commercial standpoint, but it is suboptimal for the user.
- •Bailiff's report (constat): between €200 and €500 depending on the complexity of the case. This sum is spent immediately, for a proof that may never be needed.
- •e-Soleau envelope (INPI): €15 for five years, renewable as many times as necessary. For thirty years of coverage, that is six renewals and at least €90, plus administrative upkeep to maintain over decades.
- •Qualified eIDAS timestamping subscription: an annual financial commitment, often exceeding €100 per year, even in months when the user has nothing to timestamp.
All these models are legally valid. All are structurally expensive relative to the actual risk faced by the vast majority of users.
The ETcH model
ETcH proposes a different model: a cryptographic anchoring for €2, complemented if necessary by a constat a posteriori.
The anchoring is a simple technical operation: your document generates a SHA-256 cryptographic fingerprint, and this fingerprint is inscribed in the Ethereum blockchain at a date attested by the network. No company can retroactively modify this inscription. No authority can delete it. It will remain consultable indefinitely.
At the moment you anchor, you have cryptographic evidence that this precise document existed at this date. This evidence is admissible before French courts under Article 41(1) of the European eIDAS Regulation, and constitutes a commencement de preuve par écrit (a form of evidence recognized under French law as constituting initial written proof).
This is exactly the procedure that the Marseille Judicial Court validated in its ruling of 14 March 2025 (AZ Factory v. Valeria Moda, RG 23/00046). In that case, the blockchain anchoring had been performed more than a year before the bailiff established the corresponding certificate. The court admitted the evidence.
What this means economically
You pay €2 for the anchoring. This is your premium to probative insurance.
If nothing happens — which is the most likely case for the vast majority of documents — you have spent €2. Nothing more.
If a dispute arises, you then engage a court-appointed bailiff to establish a formal certificate. The cost is generally from €200, depending on the complexity of the file and the jurisdiction. This expense occurs at a moment when it is justified by a real stake: a dispute, a claim, an ongoing procedure.
Why this model did not exist before
This model is made possible by the conjunction of two technical and legal conditions:
The perennity of cryptographic blockchain evidence.
Before the maturation of public distributed ledgers, there was no technical means of producing evidence of anteriority that would survive indefinitely without a commercial third party to maintain. This property of technical perennity is the subject of an in-depth analysis on our evidence perennity page. Previous solutions all imposed a dependency on a provider whose survival had to be ensured for the entire duration of the protection.
The judicial recognition of constat a posteriori.
Before the AZ Factory ruling of March 2025, the admissibility of a bailiff certificate established months or years after blockchain anchoring was not explicitly validated by French courts. This recognition opened the path to the economic model of deferred recourse.
These two conditions now being met, the ETcH model can exist. It may exist with other actors in the years to come. For now, it is what we offer, and we offer it in line with a broader philosophy: evidence must belong to the user, must not depend on commercial third parties for its verification, and must not require the user to pay upfront for services they may never use.
How to activate the recourse if needed
If a dispute arises and you need to activate the recourse, the procedure is simple:
You contact a commissaire de justice (the profession is national in France; any bailiff in practice can be engaged).
You transmit your ETcH proof kit to them: the original document, the SHA-256 fingerprint, the Ethereum transaction reference, the verification guide.
The bailiff performs their own verifications: recomputes the fingerprint, compares it to the one inscribed in the blockchain, attests to the concordance and the date.
They establish a certificate that can be produced in court with the evidentiary force of an authentic instrument.
No urgency exists at this stage. The certificate can be established immediately before a hearing, or preventively if litigation is on the horizon. The underlying cryptographic evidence remains unchanged.
In summary
The deferred recourse model is an economic response to the paradox of evidence of anteriority: most evidence is never used, but the evidence that is used is decisive. Rather than paying upfront for full coverage that may never be used, ETcH proposes paying the minimum necessary to preserve the possibility of activating strong evidence the day it becomes necessary.
It is the lowest-cost entry point for probative insurance. And with its bundle system, it is to our knowledge the only economic model of this type in the current ecosystem of digital proof of prior authorship.