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 search, reviews, analytics, loyalty, and on-device assistance without making a user’s identity part of the record-linkage layer.
How PCX works
PCX is designed to address the fragmentation of transaction records across merchants. The cross-merchant linkage is created using existing payment-card tokenization to associate transactions with the same pseudonymous customer account. The complete record remains under customer control, while authorized parties receive only the records or scoped results they need. This separation enables cross-merchant insights without exposing the customer’s identity.
Granted patents
Active research
Privacy-preserving commerce
Supported by
IPON and Communitech
Based in
Waterloo, Canada
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