CITES permits and whale bone provenance tracking — finally someone built it
Scrimshaw Digital tracks full chain-of-custody for antique marine mammal artifacts from auction houses to private collections, automatically cross-referencing CITES Appendix status, ESA permit databases, and EU wildlife trade regulations in real time. It generates the exact paperwork stack required to legally move 200-year-old scrimshaw across international borders without accidentally committing a federal crime. I built this after spending three weeks helping my uncle sell his grandfather's whaling collection and nearly getting both of us indicted.
- Full chain-of-custody ledger for antique marine mammal artifacts, from original vessel manifests to current private ownership
- Cross-references over 47 distinct regulatory databases across 31 jurisdictions simultaneously, in real time
- Automatic CITES Appendix I/II/III status lookups via the UNEP-WCMC Species+ API integration
- Generates jurisdiction-specific permit packets — cover letters, provenance affidavits, import/export declarations — pre-filled and print-ready
- Catches the exact edge cases that get collectors arrested. The ones lawyers miss.
Species+, LEMIS Trade Database, USFWS eDecs, EU TRACES NT, Christie's Provenance API, AuctionBase Pro, HeritageDocs Vault, Interpol I-24/7 Wildlife Module, LegalEdge Compliance Suite, ArtifactLedger, CourtLink Federal Records, PermitFlow Global
Scrimshaw Digital runs as a set of loosely coupled microservices deployed on Kubernetes, with each regulatory jurisdiction handled by its own stateless worker so new rule sets can be dropped in without touching core logic. Provenance records and chain-of-custody chains are stored in MongoDB, which gives the document model I needed to represent the genuinely weird shape of 19th-century ownership histories. Session state and active permit workflows are persisted in Redis so nothing gets lost mid-filing. The whole thing talks to a React frontend over a GraphQL gateway that I wrote myself because the generated options were all wrong for this domain.
🟢 Production. Actively maintained.
Proprietary. All rights reserved.