Hands-on guide: your first durable record in 10 minutes

You've read about durable records. You understand the concept. You know blockchain can prove integrity. But nothing replaces doing it yourself. In the next 10 minutes, you're going to send a real record to the Certyo API, watch it pass through the anchoring pipeline, and verify its integrity with cryptographic proof. You don't need blockchain experience, cryptography knowledge, or even much technical background. All you need is curiosity and a terminal.

What you're going to do

This tutorial covers the complete lifecycle of a durable record: ingestion, anchoring, and verification. When you finish, you'll have a record whose integrity can be independently verified by anyone with an internet connection. Literally, anyone.

We're not using pseudocode or theoretical examples. Every step uses the real Certyo API. The endpoints, the payloads, the responses — everything is real and reproducible.

Step 1: Send your first record

The entry point is a POST to the ingestion API. You send a record with your domain data and Certyo handles the rest:

• ✓POST /api/v1/records with your tenantId, database, collection, recordId, and the record payload
• ✓Certyo canonicalizes the payload, generates the SHA-256 hash, and queues it for batch anchoring
• ✓You receive a 202 Accepted with the snapshotId — your ticket to track and verify this record

Step 2: Watch the pipeline in action

Your record is now in the pipeline. In under 60 seconds, it will pass through these stages:

You can check the status at any time with GET /api/v1/snapshots/{snapshotId}. The status field tells you exactly where in the pipeline your record is. When you reach 'Anchored,' you have on-chain cryptographic proof that your record exists and hasn't been tampered with.

Step 3: Verify the integrity

Now comes the exciting part. Verifying that your record is intact is a single API call:

Verification takes under 500ms. The response includes the complete proof package: your record's hash, the Merkle proof, the batch root, the Polygon txHash, the block number, and the anchoring timestamp. Everything a third party needs to independently verify that your record is authentic.

What you just accomplished

In under 10 minutes, you completed something most regulated organizations can't do with their current infrastructure:

• ●You created immutable evidence — Your record has a cryptographic proof anchored on Polygon that nobody — not you, not Certyo, not an attacker — can alter.
• ●You enabled independent verification — Anyone with the proof package can verify your record against the public blockchain, without asking your permission or trusting your infrastructure.
• ●You eliminated ambiguity — If tomorrow someone questions whether this record was tampered with, you have a 500ms answer with mathematical proof. Not opinions. Not internal logs. Mathematics.

Next steps

This tutorial is just the beginning. Teams that deploy Certyo in production typically start with a subset of critical records — financial transactions, changes to sensitive data, compliance records — and expand gradually. The pipeline is the same, the cost is the same (fractions of a cent per record), and the evidence accumulates from day one. Request your pilot and start building your chain of evidence.