The customer transaction record (CTR) is commerce's ground-truth signal

It is also highly fragmented — each record may be complete, yet isolated in its own format and silo, with nothing to bind records across merchants.

PCX is designed to bind that detail across merchants under a pseudonymous account, without exposing the person behind the record.

What is PCX

PCX is an early-stage protocol and reference architecture — infrastructure, not a consumer application. It is designed to capture structured line-item transaction records through participating merchants’ transaction paths and associate them with a pseudonymous customer account. Across merchants, those records can form a coherent, customer-controlled transaction history without requiring PCX to hold the customer’s name or PAN.

Why PCX matters​

A single receipt tells you little. Across merchants, structured transaction records can reveal what was purchased, where, and how products perform over time. Today, that information remains fragmented across merchant and platform silos. PCX is designed to make it usable as a shared, privacy-preserving transaction data infrastructure for loyalty, analytics, search, and reviews.

How PCX works

When a customer pays, existing payment-card tokenization can associate the transaction with the same pseudonymous account across participating merchants. The architecture is designed to keep the complete customer record under customer control while allowing other parties to receive only the records or scoped results required for their roles. That separation enables cross-merchant services without exposing the customer’s identity.

Active research

Privacy-preserving commerce

Supported by

IPON and Communitech

Based in

Waterloo, Canada

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