D-KaP Seal (part of EpochCore’s sealed-evidence product line) gives you a single-document “write once, read many” seal that satisfies SEC Rule 17a-4 retention. Lock down one record at a time, get a tamper-evident signature back in seconds, hand it to the SEC examiner who can verify it without contacting you.
SEC Rule 17a-4 requires registered investment advisors and broker-dealers to store certain records in a Write Once, Read Many (WORM—immutable, can’t be edited or deleted) format for years. Most firms buy an entire records-management platform to satisfy this—tens of thousands of dollars per year, six-month implementations, vendor lock-in. But the regulator’s actual concern is narrow: can you prove this specific document hasn’t been altered since it was created?
If you only need to seal a handful of high-value records (a customer agreement, a trade-allocation decision, a board minute), you shouldn’t have to buy a $40k/year records platform to do it.
D-KaP Seal is single-document, on-demand 17a-4 sealing. You POST a document (or a hash of one) to the endpoint and receive a signed evidence record certifying the document’s exact bytes at that moment. The seal is built from three independent cryptographic signatures—one classical, two post-quantum—anchored to the EpochCore trust root, so the SEC can verify the document’s integrity years later without trusting our website. Pay per document. No platform commitment, no annual contract.
40668c787c463ca5. SEC examiners can verify offline without contacting us.Pick the record that needs 17a-4 protection—an executed advisory agreement, a trade-allocation justification, an investment-committee minute, a customer disclosure. Anything you want SEC-grade proof of, exactly as it stood on a specific date.
/sealSend the file (or its SHA-256 hash, if you’d rather not transmit the document itself) to the D-KaP endpoint with your API key. The service returns the signed seal in under two seconds: a JSON receipt plus a printable PDF.
Store the seal in your records folder alongside the original. If the SEC ever asks “is this document the same one that existed on the stated date?”, the examiner runs verification on the seal—and the question is answered before any follow-up email is needed.
Example: A 12-person RIA in Chicago has executed advisory agreements with 280 clients. The CCO doesn’t want a $30k/year records platform—he wants proof, on demand, that each signed agreement hasn’t been altered. He runs the 280 agreements through /seal in an afternoon (about $16,500 one-time vs. $30k recurring), files each seal beside the PDF in the existing folder structure, and is done. When the SEC examiner asks “how do you satisfy 17a-4 immutability?” the CCO hands over a single agreement plus its seal. The examiner verifies the signature, sees the document hasn’t changed since signing day, and moves on.
The competing records-management platforms list at $25k–$80k per year and require a six-month implementation. If you only have a few dozen high-risk records to seal, you’re overspending by 100x. $59 per sealed document means a 100-document compliance library costs $5,900 one-time—less than a single quarter of a competing platform—and the seal itself is what the regulator actually verifies. The platform was always just packaging.
The same sealed document, plus the cover-sheet PDF carries an invisible stealth watermark keyed to your trust root. The watermark gives you a second layer of chain-of-custody on the cover sheet itself—useful when the seal receipt gets re-screenshotted into a third party’s workpapers or pasted into an examiner’s report. Measured to stay attached through screenshots, JPEG compression, and scaling (90 of 136 attack vectors survived, false-positive rate zero, SSIM 0.985). Not “uncopyable”—the watermark layer can be stripped with effort—but tamper-evident in the ways SEC examiners actually care about. MEASURED