Custody
How custody works
What happens to a passport once you publish it — in plain terms.
- What it is
- Custody is a second, independent copy of every passport you publish — held by us in the EU, separate from the system you work in, that you cannot lose and we cannot alter. It exists so that a passport outlives any single system, including ours.
- What is held
- Each passport exactly as published, with everything attached to it: the supply chain actors, the uploaded documents, the carbon footprint declaration, and the state-of-health values. Every copy carries the moment it was received.
- When a copy is taken
- Every time a passport changes — activated, amended, retired, or a document added — a new copy is filed alongside the earlier ones. Nothing is overwritten; the history stays. Every night, the live record and custody are compared, and anything missing is filed automatically.
- What you see
- Your dashboard shows how many passports custody holds and when it last received one. Each passport shows its custody receipt: the copy on file and when it was taken.
- If we are unavailable
- A scanned QR code still answers. The public passport and its published documents are served from custody, clearly marked as a backup copy as of a stated moment, so a customs officer or a customer is never left with a dead link.
- Your own copy
- Request an export from the dashboard at any time. You receive an archive of every passport, its full record and its documents, with a checklist to verify each file. You are emailed as soon as it is ready — usually within the hour. The link is valid for seven days, in your dashboard and by email.
- Restore
- If you ever need data put back — accidental deletion, migration, an audit — contact support@batterypasseu.com. We restore from custody and tell you what was restored and from which copy.
- What you have to do
- Nothing. Platform customers get custody with the licence; there is no setup and no schedule to manage. Self-hosting operators push passports to custody through the API and get the same holding.
- How the promise is enforced
- Custody runs as a separate system in the EU, apart from the platform you work in. Its records can only be added to: the credential the platform uses there can write and read, never change or delete, and that limit is set in the store itself, not in our software. Every night an encrypted copy of the store is also written to immutable storage with a second provider.