CHRISOV explores whether financing-critical supplier facts can be verified without requiring companies to disclose commercially sensitive supply chain relationships, using privacy-preserving cryptographic attestations.
Trade finance lenders routinely need to assess suppliers beyond their direct, Tier 1 relationships — the Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers that sit further down a corporate client's supply chain. Verifying even basic facts about these suppliers today consumes time, headcount and process that is often disproportionate to the actual risk involved, without a supplier ever needing to disclose commercially sensitive data to an unfamiliar third party.
This research initiative examines whether lenders could receive a signed, tamper-evident confirmation of specific supplier facts — with the supplier's identity protected throughout — without replacing the lender's own risk standards or requiring a new credit score. The proposed mechanism uses cryptographic attestations to make this possible.
Imagine a lender being asked to finance an invoice linked to a Tier 2 supplier it has never verified directly. Confirming a single fact — that the supplier is a real, currently operating entity, not dissolved or dormant — today typically means days of email chains routed through the Tier 1 buyer, or a decision made without that confirmation at all. It is exactly this kind of fact, not a general creditworthiness judgment, that a signed, tamper-evident attestation is built to confirm quickly, without the supplier disclosing its identity.
This is an independent research initiative published by Monaco Trade Forum's Innovation Lab, established to publish research into questions that deserve evidence before products. It is currently in a market validation phase: the cryptographic mechanism has been built and demonstrated to work, but commercial licensing and pricing are not yet available, and no institution has yet deployed it in production.
It is not being offered for sale on this website. The materials below are published for open review, and to invite qualified feedback from trade finance practitioners.
What has been tested, and what has not
The research separates two different kinds of claims, and treats them differently. The cryptographic mechanism itself — identity pseudonymization and a digital signature that makes any later tampering with an attestation detectable — has been built and demonstrated, including a live test showing signature verification failing on an altered payload. That part is not a claim; it can be inspected directly.
What has not yet been established is commercial: how much time or cost an institution would actually save, what a sustainable price would be, and how the mechanism should be classified and governed under applicable law. These are treated explicitly as open questions rather than settled facts throughout the research materials, most directly in the Evidence Register and the Open Risks Register below.
The public trade finance gap is widely attributed to risk. Public data suggests it is dominated by the cost of verification — not the accuracy of the underlying risk.
How to read this research
The Independent Verification Lab allows readers to inspect the mechanism directly before reading the underlying research. The Executive Brief is a five-minute read for those who want the argument without the demonstration. The remaining documents — Research Foundation, Product Specification, Value Proposition & Economic Impact, FAQ, Evidence Register and Open Risks Register — set out the underlying evidence, the specification, the economics, and, deliberately, what is still unresolved.