Certification opens for eAuction platforms
Note added 11 October 2026. No SIGNET certification has been issued, and the certification register is empty. The auction platform profile is a Working Draft. A proposal that would change how an auction closes is registered and awaits the Standards Committee.
Concert publishes the SIGNET Auction Conformance Profile — the first product-certification path under the standard. Any electronic-auction platform can now demonstrate, with public tooling anyone can re-run, that its auctions close deterministically, its records are tamper-evident, and its awards are governed.
Auctions are where the fairness question is sharpest: could the operator influence the outcome? SIGNET's answer is architectural — the auction rules and the canonical record are standardised, so any conformant implementation closing the same bids under the same rules must reach the same award. Fairness stops being a trust exercise and becomes a conformance property.
The new profile defines exactly what a certified platform must demonstrate:
- Valid objects against the published auction schemas;
- A deterministic close — verified by rule-check and by replay: re-running the recorded bid sequence reproduces the identical award;
- A tamper-evident record — every bid and the close in an append-only, hash-chained trail where any alteration is detectable;
- Governed awards — the close recorded as a decision with rationale and provenance, human approval verifiable where thresholds require it;
- No personal data in the chain — pseudonymous records, per the identity profile.
Certification is deliberately honest about its limits: it warrants the rules and the record — not bidding UX, and not protection against collusion, which no data standard can provide.
The process is identical for every implementer: self-test with the public suite, submission, verification by re-running the same tooling, and a public registry listing. Anyone may re-run the checks against a certified platform at any time; the mark is self-policing. Existing platforms can reach the core level quickly through the conformance harness's adapter pattern — the deterministic close is the one property that must live in the platform itself.
See it live: the auction demonstration shows every certified property in the browser — run the auction, re-run it to the identical award, and tamper with a bid to watch verification fail.
Profile: docs/profiles/auction-platform.md.
Concert Foundation stewards SIGNET as a neutral standard. Certification terms are published before any party certifies, and are identical for all — including any implementation associated with Concert's founders.