The premium math
A single VLCC moves roughly 2 million barrels. A buyer shipping a cargo into an EU trade finance facility with a signed, Ed25519-verifiable provenance attestation pays $0.01–$0.025 per barrel more than a buyer who cannot document counterparty diligence — the difference between “preferentially priced documented crude” and “we have to write this through our general counsel.” On a 2 million-barrel cargo that is $20,000 to $50,000 of captured margin that would otherwise sit with the intermediary trader.
The attestation is a per-batch Digital Passport. One passport per declared batch. A producer who batches ten times a month and sells through one terminal spends between $5,000 and $15,000 a month on passports and captures six to ten times that on cargo pricing. The ROI math works on the first cargo.
See /how-it-works for the four compliance gates that produce the attestation, and /for-banks for the artifact a downstream bank evaluates. The per-cargo math and the midstream worked example are developed at institutional depth in the companion whitepaper — /producer-whitepaper.
Run the math against your own cadence
The premium math above uses the whitepaper midpoint (10 cargoes/month, VLCC, mid spread, $1,000/passport). Adjust the inputs below to match your trading-desk cadence; the outputs update live. The Phase-2 floor block underneath shows the operator-side compliance and accounting savings the calculator does not count in the per-cargo capture line — the answer to “what if no buyer pays a premium in year one?”
Why now: OFAC enforcement and ICC Green Documentation
Two regulatory currents converge in 2025–2026 and both reward documented counterparty diligence on crude.
OFAC continuous diligence against non-bank gatekeepers
OFAC enforcement against non-bank gatekeepers — traders, terminals, shipowners, commodity-finance intermediaries — has intensified materially through 2025 and 2026. The enforcement posture treats a clean counterparty today as an insufficient defense if the counterparty’s status flips tomorrow. A buyer closing a cargo today needs documented evidence that every upstream operator cleared sanctions screening as of the attestation timestamp, and a demonstrable process for flipping the artifact when status changes post-issuance.
Sovereign Ledger runs that screening on every batch declaration and then re-runs it nightly against the US Treasury SDN list. When an operator’s status flips, every previously-issued passport for that operator appends an OFAC_FLAG event and its top-level status becomes FLAGGED — without mutating the original signed event. A bank that funded a trade in good faith based on a timestamped passport can demonstrate exactly what the attested state was at the moment of funding, which is the defense an OFAC examiner actually accepts.
ICC Sustainable Trade Finance 2026 Green Documentation
The International Chamber of Commerce Sustainable Trade Finance framework rolled out preferential-pricing Green Documentation tiers in 2026. An attestation bundle with a cryptographic signing authority, verifiable provenance back to RRC Form PR data, and append-only event history is the documentation profile those tiers reward. Crude cargoes that clear with ICC Green Documentation pricing are priced meaningfully below equivalent undocumented cargoes; the passport-to-premium spread described above is mostly this signal expressing itself.
Note on EU CBAM: the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism definitive phase (effective January 2026) covers iron, steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizers, hydrogen, and electricity — crude oil is explicitly out of scope. CBAM is an adjacent regulatory trend worth tracking, but it is not the commercial driver for this product today. OFAC and ICC are.
Onboarding: first signed passport in week one
Onboarding is paperwork, not integration. A pilot tenant is live and issuing signed passports within five business days from a first call, in this order:
- Day 1 – MSA. Master Services Agreement signed with Sovereign Ledger LLC. Straightforward contract, reviewable against a normal vendor MSA by your general counsel in a working day.
- Day 2 – tenant provisioning. We stand up your tenant, assign an operator namespace, and import your RRC lease list. You nominate the first two to five users and their roles (Originator, Tenant Admin, Read-Only).
- Day 3 – training. A one-hour walkthrough of the Originator console, the batch declaration form, the compliance gate rejection path, and the Digital Passport PDF / verify URL flow.
- Day 4–5 – first batch declared. You declare a real batch against a real lease for a completed production month. Four compliance gates run. On pass, you receive a signed passport, a QR-coded PDF, and a public
/verify/:uuid URL you can share with the buyer’s bank.
No ERP integration in week one. No SFTP feed. No API contract for an engineering team to implement. The first signed passport is produced by a human in a browser against a real Texas RRC lease. Bulk and automated flows come after the pilot proves value.
Pricing
Two line items. No per-seat fees, no usage-based metering complexity, no hidden implementation invoice.
- $500–$1,500 per signed Digital Passport. Placement within the range depends on batch volume tier and pilot vs. production status. Pilot tenants land at the low end; post-pilot volume tiers step up the range.
- Monthly platform fee. Covers tenant provisioning, role-based access, dashboard, the verify endpoint, ongoing compliance-data ingestion, and support. Sized to the tenant — details negotiated as part of the MSA.
No public pricing page by design. The published range gives you enough to decide whether to schedule a call; exact numbers are part of the MSA and depend on batch cadence, lease count, and whether Subscriber API access (bank-facing programmatic verification) is part of the deal.
Book a pilot call
We respond to pilot inquiries from sales@getsovereignledger.com within one business day. The form below is attributed to the producer / midstream pipeline so your note reaches the right inbox.