What is Fair Sky Network?

Fair Sky Network lets a Chinese aerospace supplier prove the authenticity of their mill test reports to a Western buyer — by replacing (or augmenting) the easy-to-forge paper PDF with a cryptographically signed digital credential the buyer can verify in eight seconds with their phone.

Counterfeit material is reaching primary aircraft structures

Every shipment of aerospace-grade raw material — a slab of Inconel, a titanium billet, a forged turbine disk — travels with paper certificates. A Mill Test Report (chemistry, mechanicals), a Certificate of Conformance, sometimes a chain of inspection records. These certificates are PDFs with corporate letterheads and JPG-of-a-stamp graphics. They are trivial to forge on any laptop.

Two recent cases tell the story.

After Spirit, every major Western OEM (Boeing, Airbus, RTX, Honeywell) ran a top-to-bottom risk review of their Chinese suppliers. Honest Chinese suppliers — who make most of the world's aerospace-grade raw material — now have a trust problem they can't solve with paper.

Two surfaces: a supplier portal and a buyer verifier

A supplier portal. A Chinese QA manager logs in, fills in the same chemistry and mechanical data she fills in today (in Excel or paper). She clicks "Issue Credential." The portal generates a PDF that looks identical to her old paper cert — same letterhead, same red company stamp, same chemistry table — plus a small QR code in the corner.

A buyer verifier page. A Western receiving inspector scans the QR with his phone. In one second a webpage loads showing: ✓ Verified, the supplier's identity, the chemistry he's holding in his hand, and a tamper-check.

The supplier pays a subscription. The buyer pays nothing, ever. There is no app to install, no account to create, no integration to negotiate.

The chain of custody already exists — it's just joined by hand

We studied real aerospace material packages moving through the supply chain today. What they reveal is the whole opportunity in one detail.

A single melt of Inconel gets a batch number — say XK5912. That metal travels from a UK mill, through a Singapore trader, to a Chinese forge, into a finished part for a jet engine. At each handoff, a person re-types that same number onto a separate company's PDF, and re-types cross-references like "raw material cert 444488" and "test report 2024W318" by hand. That hand-copied number is the only thing linking four companies' documents into a chain.

Two more things those real documents taught us. First, the pattern is global, not just China — we saw the identical structure with a Russian mill → Mexican forge → US buyer, and a UK mill → Chinese forge → Chinese engine maker. The trust-join problem is universal; Fair Sky Network is a horizontal product that starts with the China-to-West lane because that's where the pain is sharpest today. Second, independent Nadcap-accredited test labs already sign the critical steps — so the multi-party, independently-attested model isn't something we have to impose. It already exists on paper. We just make it verifiable.

One shipment, end to end

Follow a single batch of Inconel 718 from Precision Alloy Mill in Jiangsu to a US Tier-1 aerostructures buyer.

1. At the pilot mill, Mrs. Liu's lab tech runs chemistry on a fresh heat (LD-2026-0847). Instead of typing the result into Excel and printing a paper cert, the tech enters the same numbers into the Fair Sky Network portal and clicks Issue.
2. The portal signs the data with the mill's cryptographic key (stored in the mill's office, not ours). It generates a PDF that looks just like the old paper one — with a QR code added.
3. Once a day, our service in Hong Kong batches every credential issued that day into a single cryptographic fingerprint and publishes it on the public Ethereum blockchain. This costs us $5–20 in network fees. Nothing identifiable goes on the chain.
4. The shipment leaves Jiangsu with the PDF emailed to the buyer and a printed copy stapled to the dock receipt — the same workflow Mrs. Liu has used for years.
5. Six weeks later in Wichita, receiving inspector Greg pulls the box, sees the QR on the printed cert, and scans it. In one second his phone shows: ✓ Verified, the supplier identity, the exact chemistry he is holding, and the Ethereum block where it was anchored.
6. If the cert had been forged — somebody edited the PDF, somebody photoshopped a fake QR onto a counterfeit, somebody made up a fake supplier — the page turns red and tells Greg exactly what's wrong. He rejects the material at the dock, not after it gets bolted to an airplane.

That's the entire product, from both sides.

Four storage layers across three jurisdictions

Plus, separately: the supplier's signing key lives in an HSM in the supplier's own office. We do not hold it. If we vanish tomorrow, every credential they've ever issued is still verifiable from public Ethereum — only new issuance stops.

Tracing "Ni = 53.1%" through the system

Wang Jing, a lab tech at the pilot mill, runs chemistry on heat LD-2026-0847. The first number she types is Ni = 53.1%. Here is everywhere that number ends up.

So Ni = 53.1 lives in three places: as a raw value in PRC (L1), as a signed field in the credential payload in Hong Kong (L2), and as a tiny contribution to a daily hash on Ethereum (L4). Each copy serves a different purpose.

The compliance map

What survives when something breaks

The four-layer split isn't elegance for its own sake. It's resilience to specific failure modes that have killed prior projects.

Four choices that separate us from every prior attempt

Most prior attempts (TradeLens, IBM Food Trust, B3i) died for the same reason: a single big company tried to host a "consortium" that suppliers were supposed to join. Nobody trusts a network controlled by their biggest customer or competitor.

1. Suppliers pay, buyers verify free. Reverses the broken consortium model. The party that benefits from proving authenticity is the party that funds the system.
2. Documentation fraud first, physical tagging later. Forged paperwork is the tractable Year-1 problem. Molecular taggants and RFID can come in Year 2 once the data backbone exists.
3. Neutral hosting — explicitly NOT a Chinese state chain. Ant Chain, FISCO BCOS, JD Chain, VeChain are all PRC-government-adjacent and Western OEMs will not trust them. We use public Ethereum (whose neutrality is the point) and a Hong Kong corporate entity (English common law, neutral arbitration).
4. We never lead with the word "blockchain." Enterprise aerospace buyers have moved past crypto-bro pitches. We talk about "verifiable credentials" — the W3C standard the EU and US DHS already use for digital identity. Same cryptography, sane marketing.

What we are not

What we stop, what we detect, what we don't claim

"Impossible to fake" is not a claim we make. A credential binds the data, the signer, and the chain links — it cannot, by itself, bind the atoms in the box. Precision matters in front of a quality organization, so here is the honest map, attack by attack:

Note that the two headline incidents — AOG Technics and the Baoji case — are the first two rows: fully stopped by the credential alone. That's why documentation fraud is the wedge. Rows 4–5 are why the pilot co-funds independent coupon testing, and why every credential carries an assurance field — self-attested vs lab-verified. The system works without sampling; the badge just says so honestly, and the buyer can decide what each tier is worth.

The code is public. The business is not.

Our code is genuinely open source. That sounds backwards — "if anyone can run it, what are you selling?" — but it's the same model that built Red Hat ($34B sale to IBM), MongoDB, GitLab, Sentry, and Supabase. Open source is the trust contract; the business is the operation.

Linux is open source — Red Hat sold for $34B.
PostgreSQL is open source — Supabase and Crunchy are billion-dollar businesses.
Sentry's error-tracking is open source — the company is valued at >$3B.
The code is the easy part. Becoming the trusted operator is the hard part.

Where we are right now

Two pages, one question each

Those two questions, answered yes by enough people, are the entire business.

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