Guide
How Veylent works
1. Signing a document
People sign in the Veylent desktop app, available for macOS, Windows and Linux. They open a PDF, place their signature where it belongs, add any text such as a name or date, and confirm.
- Signatures can be drawn, uploaded as an image, or typed.
- Each signer has a profile: name, email, and optionally organisation and position. This is what a verifier will see later.
- Saved signatures and text snippets sync across a person’s devices, through your own Veylent server.
2. Anchoring the signature
When someone signs, Veylent calculates a fingerprint of the document and the signer’s details. A fingerprint is a short code that changes completely if even one character of the document changes, and it can’t be turned back into the document.
That fingerprint is recorded on a public blockchain with the time of signing. A public blockchain is a shared ledger copied across thousands of independent computers. Once something is written there, no one can change or delete it: not the signer, not your organisation, and not Veylent.
- Your organisation’s Veylent server submits the record and pays the small network fee. Signers don’t need a crypto wallet, tokens, or any blockchain knowledge.
- It takes a few seconds, and the signer sees a confirmation when it’s done.
- The document itself is never uploaded or published. It stays wherever you keep your files.
What ends up in the signed PDF
The signed PDF contains the visible signature, a QR code that links to the record, and the signing record itself, embedded inside the file. The QR code also carries a key that unlocks the signer’s details, so they can be read only by someone who has the document.
Several signers
When a second person signs the same document, their record points back to the first. Each further signature does the same, which builds a complete signing history in order. A verifier sees every signature on the document, not just the last one.
3. Verifying a document
Anyone who receives a signed document can check it, in any of three ways:
| How | What they need | What it confirms |
|---|---|---|
| Scan the QR code with a phone camera | Any smartphone. No app or account. | The signing record exists, who signed, when, and the full signing history |
| The Veylent Verify mobile app | The free app; it also reads QR codes from photos | The same as above |
| Open the PDF in the Veylent desktop app | The PDF file | All of the above, plus that the file hasn’t changed since it was signed |
The last check recalculates the fingerprint of the file as each person signed it and compares it with the one on the blockchain. If anything they signed has changed, even a single character, the fingerprints won’t match and Veylent reports it. If something was added after the last signature, Veylent says so and shows the version that was signed.
Why this holds up over time
With most e-signature services, proof lives in the vendor’s database. Veylent’s fingerprint and timestamp live on a public blockchain, independent of Veylent and of your own servers. So the core evidence that a document existed in this exact form at this time, and was signed, doesn’t depend on any one company still being around.