Systems and methods are provided for efficiently maintaining a transaction sequence witness service to ensure that requests to read data provide consistent results across all storage nodes in a distributed system. Each storage node that stores data in response to a particular update event may first update the transaction sequence witness service with the sequence number for the update event. Thus, any other storage node that services a subsequent request for the data will be able to see, via the transaction sequence witness service, the sequence number that must be available on the storage node to respond to the request.