"We log everything" is not the same claim as "our logs can't be quietly edited after the fact" — and for evidence a regulator or auditor might actually check, the second one is the claim that matters.
Almost every platform can show you a log. Far fewer can show you that the log hasn't been quietly edited since it was written. Those are different guarantees, and the second one is the one that actually holds up when someone has a reason to doubt you — a regulator investigating a complaint, an auditor sampling records, a court asking whether a consent really existed on the date you say it did. A log that anyone with database access can rewrite isn't evidence. It's a claim shaped like evidence.
Every event in Consent Tree's audit trail — a consent granted, a right exercised, a notice published — carries the hash of the event immediately before it. That single fact does the real work: altering or deleting a past entry doesn't just change that entry, it breaks the chain from that point forward in a way that's mathematically detectable, not merely discouraged by access controls. You don't have to trust that nobody with the right permissions edited a row. You can check.
On top of the chain, evidence exports are signed with an Ed25519 key and timestamped against an independent authority (RFC 3161) — so a signature check doesn't depend on asking us anything. It depends on cryptography anyone can run themselves.
There's a real, deliberate line here we don't cross: Consent Tree attests evidence, it never issues audit opinions. Whether a given body of evidence satisfies a particular compliance question is a judgment call that belongs to the auditor examining it, not to the platform that produced the records. We build the thing that can be checked independently. What it means is somebody else's call to make — and we think that's the honest division of labour, not a hedge.
This isn't a design doc — it's live on this site. Drop a real Consent Tree evidence pack into the verifier and your own browser checks the signature, the file hashes, and the chain. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere to do it. That's the whole point: a claim you can verify without trusting the party making it is worth more than one you can't, no matter how confidently either is stated.