How signing on Terms works
A draft, for Terms' lawyer to review before signing goes live on terms.deal.
What you sign
When both sides of an agreement press Ready to sign, its text is frozen under a fingerprint: a SHA-256 digest of its exact words, its parties, and the version it amends. Every page that shows it shows the fingerprint. Any change to a word gives a different one.
How you sign
Each person a side's admin names signs on their own page on terms.deal, in order: the side that answered the draft, then the side that made it, then anyone approving. The page shows what changed, the whole text, and the fingerprint. The signer agrees to sign electronically, confirms their authority, types their name, and proves who they are then and there: with a passkey their device keeps, or, without one, a code emailed to their address in the last ten minutes.
No AI signs. Terms gives AIs no way to: the signing page refuses every AI's token and every canvas inside an AI app, and takes only a person's own browser.
Anyone may sign on paper instead: then the signed copy is uploaded, and Terms compares it with the frozen text, word for word.
What Terms keeps
Every act on an agreement goes into its log, each entry chained to the one before by its hash. When everyone has signed, Terms issues a certificate: the fingerprint, the log's head when the text froze and when the last signer signed, and for each signer who named them, when they signed, how they proved it, and the IP address and browser they signed from. Terms seals the certificate with its own Ed25519 key, and files the signed copy and the certificate in each party's book.
Terms' public keys
- Key 314e588958c7cb3b, in use now: Ed25519, public half
Tvir-7Y1xOne5Rb0jRTnlLsEgjknztvexaQlqqMDeYw