FedNow runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with settlement in seconds. The integrity expectations are the highest in financial services. H33 makes every transaction receipt-bound, every control continuously attested, and every record verifiable for the next 30 years — without trusting H33 to still exist.
A FedNow participant operates a payment surface with three uncomfortable properties at once. Settlement is final in seconds, so there is no overnight batch in which to catch a problem. The service runs 24×7×365, so there is no quiet maintenance window. And the retention requirements stretch decades into the future, into a window where quantum-capable adversaries are widely expected to be reading today's encrypted records.
The compliance posture that worked for a nightly ACH window — screenshots, periodic audits, sampled logs — does not survive contact with this pattern. By the time a quarterly audit notices a discrepancy, irreversible settlement has occurred thousands of times. By the time a 2034 examiner asks how a 2026 payment was authorized, the controls that produced it may have been replaced, the vendor may have disappeared, and the cryptography that signed the record may be obsolete.
The participants who treat FedNow as another payment rail are underestimating what changed. The right posture is closer to: every transaction must carry its own proof, generated in real time, verifiable by anyone, durable across decades.
Every authorized payment, every denied payment, every control decision emits a 74-byte cryptographic receipt signed under three independent post-quantum signature families. The receipt is portable: it can be handed to an examiner, an insurer, or a counterparty without giving them access to H33 or to your systems.
HATS produces a continuous attestation stream for the controls FedNow examiners care about: identity verification, sanctions screening, fraud scoring, transaction monitoring, and reconciliation. Auditors no longer sample. They verify the stream.
The verifier that confirms an H33 receipt is open. It does not need to call H33. It does not need an H33 account. If H33 disappears in 2030, the receipt your bank produced in 2026 still verifies in 2034.
FedNow records will outlive the security assumptions of today's signatures. H33 signs under ML-DSA-65 + FALCON-512 + SLH-DSA-SHA2-128f — three signature families with independent hardness assumptions. A break in one does not break the receipt.
| Who asks | What they verify · via the H33 receipt |
|---|---|
| Federal Reserve examiner | That the sanctions / fraud / authorization controls fired before the payment, in the order claimed, against the policy in force at the time |
| Counterparty bank | That your end of a disputed transfer carried the required authorizations and that no relevant alert was suppressed |
| Internal audit | A continuous stream of attested control evidence — no screenshot collection, no quarterly scramble |
| Cyber insurer | Continuous evidence of the controls the policy was underwritten against, with HATS providing the attestation layer |
| Customer (in dispute) | An independently verifiable artifact showing what was authorized, by whom, under what policy version, at what timestamp |
| Future examiner (2034+) | That the 2026 record was signed under standards still trusted in 2034, with the verifier still available, even if H33 the company is not |
The continuous attestation layer. Replaces sampled audit with a stream of receipts examiners can independently verify.
For payment surfaces operated by automated decision systems. Every authorization, denial, and policy override carries a portable receipt.
The 74-byte receipt format. Verifiable offline, by anyone, for decades. The artifact your 2034 examiner can still confirm.
Three-family post-quantum signatures: ML-DSA-65, FALCON-512, SLH-DSA. One break in three does not break the receipt.
Operational secrets used by your FedNow stack are referenced, never disclosed. Every use is receipt-bound and audited.
Demonstrate cryptographic compliance to regulators and counterparties with evidence anyone can confirm.
FedNow obligations span fraud monitoring, sanctions screening, dispute resolution, settlement integrity, recordkeeping, and reporting. H33 does not replace existing controls. It makes them verifiable — by you, by your counterparty, by your examiner, decades after the fact.
The examiner asks "show me the controls." You hand over a stream of receipts they can verify themselves. The screenshot-gathering phase is gone.
Both sides of a disputed payment look at the same independently verifiable receipt. Disagreements collapse to facts.
If you swap fraud vendors, payment processors, core systems, or even cryptographic standards, the H33-74 receipts produced under the old stack still verify cleanly.
Insurer claims teams accept receipt-bound evidence as a stronger artifact than self-attestation. HATS provides the continuous attestation layer underwriters increasingly require.
Talk to us about adding H33 receipts to your existing FedNow stack, or see how the substrate runs in production.
No. H33 never touches money or settlement. The FedNow Service, operated by the Federal Reserve, clears and settles every payment exactly as it does today. H33 is an authorization and attestation layer that proves a message is genuine, compliant, and unaltered before it settles.
Because FedNow settlement is final within seconds and the resulting record must stay defensible for years. An adversary can record authorization traffic now and forge it once a quantum computer exists. Signing with NIST-standardized ML-DSA and ML-KEM keeps the evidence unforgeable across that transition.
Yes. FedNow uses ISO 20022 messaging. H33 attaches a detached attestation to the pacs.008 credit transfer without modifying the payload the Fed receives, so your existing connection and message flows are unchanged.
Anyone holding the 74-byte attestation can verify all three proofs offline using the open Verifier CLI. No call back to H33, no access to H33 systems, and no trust in H33's infrastructure is required — the proof stands on its own mathematics.
The three authorization proofs use independent cryptographic assumptions. A break in one family does not let an attacker forge the other two, so a single cryptographic failure cannot manufacture a valid payment authorization.