OpenBooks Verified
A transparency seal you don’t have to take on faith.
Most “transparency seals” are self-reported. OpenBooks Verified is derived from data: it reads an organization’s immutable, hash-chained ledger and its public anchors, and issues a seal only when the cryptography checks out. No org can set its own tier. If the chain ever breaks, the seal is revoked automatically — on the verify page and on every embedded badge.
Verified
The books are public, current, anchored, and the chain verifies.
- Financial Record published for the most recent completed fiscal year
- Books current within 30 days
- At least one anchor written to a stable public URL
- No unresolved integrity failures on the hash chain
Verified+
Everything in Verified, plus evidence and reconciliation depth.
- ≥90% of current-period transactions have attached evidence
- Bank feed auto-reconciled at least monthly
- No unresolved judgment items older than 14 days
Verified Complete
Everything in Verified+, plus independent audit and public timestamping.
- Third-party auditor signed the current-year Record (signed PDF or verifiable webhook)
- Ledger anchored at least weekly
- Anchors published to an independent public store (OpenTimestamps)
What makes it cryptographic, not cosmetic
- Every ledger entry is chained with SHA-256; changing one character breaks every hash after it.
- The head hash is anchored to a stable public URL, so history can’t be quietly rewritten.
- Higher tiers require signals we can measure — evidence attachments, auditor sign-off recorded on the ledger, OpenTimestamps receipts. We never assume an unmeasured criterion is met.
- Every seal change (issued, upgraded, revoked) is itself written to the ledger, so the seal’s history is as tamper-evident as the books.
- Anyone can recompute the whole thing with
curland a hash function — the “verify this yourself” block is on every org’s verify page.
A note on the 62% figure. Candid’s 2023 research found nonprofits with a verified transparency seal receive 62% more in donations than peers without one. That statistic is about Candid’s seal. OpenBooks Verified is a different, cryptographic seal — we don’t claim it produces that lift. We claim something narrower and checkable: the record behind it is intact and independently verifiable.