Guide

Certificates of authenticity: who can issue one, and when

Published 23 September 2026 — Proof

A certificate is only worth what it is hard to get. If anyone could issue one on anything, it would say nothing. So the moments a certificate appears on Veriroo are deliberately few, and worth knowing before you go looking for a button.

The four routes

• The artist issues one on their own work, from CoA Services, once the piece has enough record behind it. Uses one CoA credit.
• Expert verification includes one when the work passes. Covered by the verification fee, not bought separately.
• A buyer adds one at checkout if the artist did not include it and the piece qualifies. This is the only moment a buyer can add one.
• Every limited edition number gets one automatically when it sells, stating the process, paper, year printed and its number in the edition.

After a piece has sold, an artist can no longer simply issue one. At that point a certificate needs an expert verification, which is why the tick box at checkout is worth using.

What a piece needs before a certificate is possible

Full provenance, which Veriroo shows as Green Status. That means the record holds a title, medium and materials, dimensions, a linked artist profile, an artist story or statement, at least one provenance note or fingerprint record, and a primary image.

It is a checklist rather than a judgement, and Verity shows you which parts you have and which are missing. Most pieces that fall short are missing the story or a single provenance note rather than anything hard.

Why open prints never get one

An open print is an unsigned, unnumbered reproduction that never sells out. Issuing certificates for an unlimited run would drain the word of meaning, so they carry none and are labelled as such everywhere.

If you want signed and numbered with a certificate on every number, that is a limited edition, which is a different thing the artist makes and signs themselves.

What a certificate is not

It is not an expert opinion unless an expert produced it. An artist issuing a certificate on their own work is making a statement about a piece they made, which is meaningful, and is not the same as an independent examination. The record shows which you are looking at.

What a seal adds

Once a certificate exists, a Secure Seal can be bound to the piece. The seal is not the certificate and holds nothing worth stealing: it is a pointer to the live record, which is exactly why it keeps working as ownership changes.

A printed certificate says what was true the day it was printed. A seal, tapped with a phone, says what is true now.