One Year of SEAL in Production

In technology, a product launch gets a press release. A product that works quietly for a year gets something more valuable: silence. No incident reports. No emergency patches. No “we’re aware of the issue” posts. Just a system doing what it was built to do, every day, at a scale that keeps growing.

One year ago, HIN deployed SEAL as the engine for the new HIN Mail — replacing centralized mail servers with encrypted swarm delivery across Swiss healthcare. There was no launch event. The system went live, and healthcare professionals kept doing their jobs. Twelve months later, the volume has roughly doubled: from approximately 440,000 interactions per month to over 800,000.

That growth was not driven by a marketing campaign. It was driven by 30,000+ healthcare professionals discovering that sending sensitive patient communications had become simpler, not harder.

What changed — and what didn’t

For the doctors and medical staff using HIN Mail every day, almost nothing changed. That was the point. SEAL integrates via SMTP into existing mail infrastructure. Healthcare professionals keep their email client, compose messages the way they always have. The SEAL engine handles the rest — encrypting, fragmenting, and distributing each message across IPFS so that no single system ever holds the complete content.

For the patients receiving those messages, everything changed.

Instead of downloading an HTML file — the old, clunky workflow — they receive a link. Click it on any device, in any browser. The Web Verification App reassembles and decrypts the message right there. No app to install. No account to create. No software to download. Mobile authentication verifies the recipient’s identity, providing proof of receipt that is personally bound — stronger than registered mail, because no proxy receipt is possible.

Stefan Geldreich, who led the pilot at the HOCH hospital network, called the result “modern, simple, secure, and intuitive” — adding that “the clear structure and simplified processes are a major benefit for us.” That feedback comes from a hospital network running real patient communications through SEAL every single day.

Why the architecture matters

Traditional secure email concentrates data on central servers. Breach the server, access the messages. The architecture itself is the vulnerability.

SEAL eliminates that target. Each message is encrypted with AES-GCM-256, fragmented, and distributed across a swarm of IPFS nodes. The decryption entry point is delivered separately — via email, SMS, messenger, or QR code. The remaining fragments sit on IPFS, identified only by content hashes.

This is not an incremental improvement over centralized secure email. It is a fundamentally different security model — one where there is no central server to breach, because there is no central server.

The doubling in volume over nine months reflects something important about that architecture: it scales without friction. When adoption grows, the swarm grows with it. No capacity planning meetings. No server migration weekends.

The starting point, not the destination

SEAL was deployed as the first step in a much larger transformation. It solves the immediate, critical problem: how do you deliver encrypted, verified communications to someone who does not share your IT infrastructure — without asking them to install anything?

But communication is only the first layer.

Stargate — HIN’s new gateway infrastructure, developed by Vereign — replaces the legacy mail gateway that operated for approximately 30 years. Where SEAL makes messages provable, Stargate makes entire data exchanges provable: identity management, verifiable credentials, structured clinical data, encrypted mesh networking, and regulatory compliance built into the data model rather than bolted on afterward.

The phased rollout continues. 2026 brings gateways to hospitals and institutions across Switzerland. 2027 targets HIN Clients in GP offices. The transformation is ongoing — and SEAL’s year in production proved that the foundation holds.

What this proves beyond healthcare

Healthcare demands the highest bar for data protection — patient records, clinical communications, insurance coordination. No room for “good enough.” If decentralized, verified communication works here, at this scale, it works anywhere organizations exchange sensitive information across trust boundaries.

Finance. Legal. Compliance. Defence.

The trust gap is the same everywhere: two organizations need to exchange something that matters and cannot afford to delegate that trust to a third party.

A year of production is not an announcement. It is evidence. And in trust infrastructure, evidence is the only currency that matters.