Verify a credential

What a Can0nical verification proves

That a named organisation confirmed this person delivered this work, on a date, and that the record has not changed since. The confirmation came from the party who received the work, not from the person claiming it and not from us. We record it; we do not grade it.

You do not have to take our word for any of that, which is the point of this page. The check runs against a public record, needs no account, and returns the same answer for you as it would for anyone else, including us.

A PDF can be edited and a screenshot can be staged. What you see here is the canonical copy of a verified work record, which is the version the confirmation was recorded against. If what you were sent does not match what you see here, what you see here is the record.

What it does not prove

It is a narrow claim on purpose, and narrow and true beats broad and unfalsifiable. A verification does not say the work was good, that this person is right for your role, or that anything outside the confirmed record is accurate. It does not rank anyone against anyone. A profile shows only what was confirmed through us, so an absence of records is not evidence of anything: plenty of good work is never logged.

What to do if a check does not match

A mismatch means the record changed after it was confirmed, and it is worth asking about rather than assuming the worst: the commonest cause is a typo in the identifier you were given. Check the characters, then ask the person for the link directly rather than a code copied by hand. If a correct identifier still fails, treat the document you were shown as unconfirmed, and tell us at hello@can0nical.com. A record that cannot be checked is the one thing this system is built to make visible.

Verifying without an account

There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to pay. Anyone holding an identifier can run this check, as many times as they like, and nobody is told that you did. That is a deliberate constraint rather than a free tier: a record only we could vouch for would be a record that depends on us still being here. The white paper sets out why that matters, and our definition of proof of work covers the term itself.