Blind Notary

By Anton Pyrogovskyi • 4 minutes read •

Table of Contents

Bridging the Gap

Electronic signing solutions have become essential for both businesses and individuals. While Web2 eSigning platforms are popular for their ease of use, they often depend on centralized authorities, which can compromise privacy and traceability. On the flip side, Web3 offers secure methods for signing and verifying information, but these can be daunting for those not familiar with blockchain technology. Additionally, both Web2 and Web3 solutions typically focus only on the core aspects of transactions, leaving room for potential data leaks when parties communicate outside the platform.

That’s where Blind Notary (repo) comes in, a tool designed to seamlessly blend the strengths of both Web2 and Web3. Blind Notary enables in-band identity, communication, analysis, and signing between the signatories of confidential documents and aims to provide a straightforward, user-friendly experience that ensures privacy, traceability, and secure communication throughout the signing process.

Blind Notary has been created as part of the ETHGlobal Agentic Ethereum hackathon.

Key Ideas

Blind Notary allows you to prepare documents for signing while keeping the template secure and private.

Once a document is ready, Blind Notary will let you invite other signatories and give them access to the document content and metadata securely. This ensures everyone is on the same page without risking data leaks through communication external to the “privacy box”.

The platform includes an AI agent to help clarify and resolve any doubts during the signing process. The AI operates while keeping your data private, ensuring sensitive information stays secure. You can “talk to the PDF” and ask it to explain or summarize information within. The other signatories can use the agent to interact with the documents as well.

To prevent details from leaking outside the platform, Blind Notary also offers a built-in secure communication channel to maintain the privacy and confidentiality of negotiations.

Blind Notary obtains digital signatures while keeping the entire signing flow traceable. This ensures all actions are recorded and verifiable, enhancing trust and accountability.

Future versions of Blind Notary can be compliant with electronic signature regulations in the EU (eIDAS) and US (ESIGN/UETA) by providing standard certificates of completion.

To make transactions smoother, Blind Notary lets you (the author) arrange network fees and other costs on behalf of the other signatories in advance.

Technology Stack

Blind Notary integrates:

The chat context and history, including uploaded files, are stored encrypted in Nillion nilDB. This is done using the wrapper library for enhanced privacy and a custom codec to securely store any binary data. The AI agent follows the ReAct paradigm, driven by LangChain/LangGraph and integrated with Coinbase CDP & AgentKit on Base for payment processing. It uses local RAG and auxiliary tools, like a PDF parser and vector store. In fact, for the agent only the actual LLM inference requires an external call. Can we change this too? Likely yes. The UI was developed using Next.js with shadcn/ui and Vercel AI SDK for client-server communication. The initial UI scaffold was created with v0.

In line with the stateless/ephemeral approach, Blind Notary doesn’t store any persistent state server-side, except for saving state in nilDB which is MPC-encrypted.

Future

The hackathon allowed enough time to plan, build and deploy the first version, but there is much to be done in the future for this to be a universal solution. For example, nice to have would be:

The overarching goal is to provide a complete solution that produces artifacts that are independently verifiable outside of the “privacy bubble” without depending on a central authority.