Docs
Certificates
How a certificate gets issued and numbered, what the public verify page shows, and how revocation works.
A certificate is Bench’s record that someone at your shop looked at a specific watch and reached a verdict on it: Genuine, Not authentic, or Inconclusive. You can issue one directly from Certificates > New, or have one created for you automatically at the end of an authentication request, when the authenticator toggles “issue certificate” on their verdict. Either path fills in the same fields: watch brand, model, reference and serial, an optional year, the verdict, and any notes, all recorded under whoever issued it.
The certificate number
Each certificate gets a number in the shape {your prefix}-C-{8 characters}, where those 8 characters come from hashing your shop, the watch’s serial, the exact moment of issue, and a random value together with SHA-256, then taking the first 8 characters of the result. The point of building it that way is that nobody can work backwards from a watch’s serial number to guess or predict a certificate number, and no two certificates ever collide.
The public verify page
Every certificate has its own page at /verify/{certificate number}, open to anyone, no login required. It shows the verdict as a clear badge, the watch’s details, a masked version of the serial (not the full number, so the page itself can’t be used to look up a watch by serial), the issue date, who issued it, and any notes that were left. There’s also a QR code on the page that, scanned from a photo or a printed tag, just opens this same page again, so a buyer standing in front of the watch can check it on the spot.
Revocation
If a certificate needs to be pulled back, whether it was issued in error or the watch is now under dispute, revoking it takes a reason. That reason isn’t private: the public verify page immediately starts showing a clear “This certificate has been revoked” notice along with it, right at the top, above everything else. A revoked certificate never quietly disappears; the page still resolves, it just tells the truth about the certificate’s current state. See Authentication operations for how a verdict gets to this point in the first place.