Modern safety regulation relies on certification, inspection, and periodic compliance reporting to demonstrate adherence to safety standards. While these mechanisms verify that systems met defined requirements at specific moments in time, they do not establish the operational condition of those systems at the moment they are relied upon. This structural limitation creates what has been described as the “Unknown Present,” an evidentiary gap between historic compliance and real-time operational safety.This report introduces the SAFE-Matter™ governance framework, a system designed to support continuous operational safety assurance through structured oversight of evidence reporting, verification, trust evaluation, and enforcement mechanisms. The framework establishes institutional roles responsible for maintaining evidentiary integrity, supervising certification partners, resolving disputes, and ensuring that operational safety evidence remains transparent, verifiable, and legally defensible.By combining continuous evidence generation with formal governance oversight, the SAFE-Matter™ model provides a mechanism through which duty holders, regulators, insurers, and investigators can determine whether protective capability existed at the moment reliance occurred.