What Signattio is not — and why that matters before you sign

A qualified electronic signature under Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 is an advanced one created on a qualified signature creation device, based on a qualified certificate issued by a qualified trust service provider (article 3(12)). Only that combination carries, under article 25(2), the equivalent legal effect of a handwritten signature.

Signattio issues no qualified certificates and is not a qualified trust service provider. Its evidence is the advanced tier: PAdES signatures with trusted timestamps and a full ceremony record, built so a court or counterparty can verify every claim rather than take it on presumption. If your workflow is one of the ones that legally requires the qualified tier — notarial deeds, certain public-sector acts — the honest answer is that this product does not replace it.

Nothing here notarizes. Where a member state requires a notarial deed, that procedure stays paper-based with its own officials; an e-signature service does not enter it.

Nothing here is legal advice either. The legal pages on this site explain the framework and cite articles; they cannot tell you what your particular contract or jurisdiction requires. For that, a lawyer.

The tamper-evidence in the audit trail is a linear hash chain, not a distributed ledger: each record row is hashed with SHA-256 together with the hash of the row before it, seeded from the envelope's own identifier. Any later edit to a row breaks every hash that follows it — detectable by anyone who recomputes the chain.

There is no consensus mechanism, no token and no network of strangers verifying each other, because there is nothing for them to verify: the chain travels inside the signed PDF, and the PDF's own PAdES signature and timestamp anchor it in time. A mechanism is being used precisely, not fashionably.

A signature is produced by a key or a drawn line; agreement is produced by a person. The cryptography proves who signed what bytes and when. Whether the signer read and accepted the terms is a human fact — which is exactly why the ceremony record and the audit trail exist alongside the signature rather than instead of it.

Identity in Signattio is a verified claim: a one-time code to an email address or phone number, or a single-use magic link. For these levels, the record shows which address or number was used, when the code was issued and when it was confirmed. It does not show a passport.

That is an honest description of the tier, and it is why the identity method is recorded in the evidence pack instead of being glossed over: whoever later evaluates the signature can see exactly how far the identity assurance went.