Provenance and Digital Ownership

Overview

Provenance is the backbone of trust and authenticity. It encompasses all the information that supports the existence, history, and evolution of an object over time. Much like a family tree that traces our ancestors and relatives, provenance maps the origin, journey, and transformations of an object. This concept is crucial in various fields, including history, art, collectibles, and increasingly, digital data. As we delve deeper into the digital age, understanding provenance becomes essential for verifying the value and trustworthiness of digital assets.

Digital Provenance in Web2

In the Web2 era, advances in computing and cryptography made establishing verifiable digital data provenance more feasible. However, the incentives and infrastructure of Web2 led to significant limitations. Most applications developed during this period prioritized permissioned systems and gatekeeping user data provenance. Social networks, for example, often restricted access to their APIs and did not allow users to verifiably export their data to third-party applications. This created a platform risk where users had no control or visibility into whether their data was being altered or deleted by the platform.

These constraints highlighted the need for a more transparent and user-centric approach to digital provenance. The inability to ensure data integrity and authenticity in Web2 was a significant drawback, necessitating a shift towards a system that could offer robust, verifiable provenance.

Onchain Provenance in Web3

The advent of blockchain technology, particularly Ethereum, has revolutionized the concept of digital provenance. Over the past decade, blockchain has provided strong guarantees for publicly available provenance, enabling a new realm of possibilities for developers, brands, and creators. One of the most prominent innovations in this space is the proliferation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

NFTs are unique digital assets that derive their value not only from their statefulness (such as on-chain transfer and exchange) but also from their strong provenance. The immutable and transparent nature of blockchain ensures that the origin and history of an NFT can be traced and verified, thereby instilling trust and authenticity.

However, the high resource costs associated with Ethereum have limited the scalability of on-chain provenance. To address this, stateless provenance methods, such as lazy minting through trusted intermediaries, have been explored. While these solutions offer some benefits, they ultimately fail to provide cryptographically robust provenance for the underlying data objects. This is where innovations like Witness come into play, aiming to offer free, trustless, and sovereign access to on-chain provenance for data at scale.

Provenance as Digital Ownership

In the physical world, ownership is often tied to the scarcity and control of tangible items. Physical objects are inherently scarce because they are challenging to reproduce perfectly. Ownership, therefore, represents a claim of control over these physical items.

The digital world, however, operates differently. Digital files and data can be duplicated perfectly and at virtually no cost. In this context, the origin and history of a digital item—its provenance—becomes the valuable and scarce resource. Provenance ensures that the digital item is unique and authentic, much like physical items.

When digital provenance is coupled with smart contract blockchains like Ethereum, where standards such as ERC721 (used for NFTs) are designed to programmatically manage provenance, digital items can attain similar properties of scarcity and ownership as their physical counterparts. This transformation allows for the creation of unique, verifiable digital assets that can be owned, transferred, and traded securely.

Witness: Empowering Users with Provenance

Witness represents a significant step forward in the realm of digital provenance and ownership. By providing a system that enables users and applications to establish universally verifiable claims of provenance over their data, Witness empowers users with ultimate control over their digital assets. This system ensures that provenance is maintained in a cryptographically robust manner, eliminating the need for trusted intermediaries and reducing the risk of data tampering. Data are kept off-chain with no security and privacy leaks.

A key innovation of Witness is its capability to provide off-chain digital provenance with on-chain check-ins as proofs. This approach allows for the efficient management of provenance data without the full dependency on a single blockchain. Off-chain provenance enables users to record and track the history of their digital assets in a flexible and scalable manner. Periodic check-ins on the blockchain then serve as immutable proof points, verifying the integrity and authenticity of the off-chain data.

This hybrid model leverages the strengths of both off-chain and on-chain systems. Off-chain storage offers scalability and flexibility, while on-chain check-ins provide the security and trustlessness of blockchain technology. With Witness, users can maintain detailed provenance records off-chain and periodically anchor these records to the blockchain, ensuring their data is both verifiable and scalable.

By adopting this approach, Witness aims to create an ecosystem where digital provenance is freely accessible, trustless, and scalable. Users gain sovereign control over their data, ensuring its authenticity and integrity. This strengthens the value and trustworthiness of digital assets, making them comparable to physical assets in terms of ownership and scarcity.

Conclusion

Provenance is an essential concept that bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds. In the digital age, where data and digital assets can be easily duplicated, provenance provides the much-needed assurance of authenticity and uniqueness.

With Witness, we see a transformative potential for establishing verifiable digital track records across various domains:

Talent Verification: Witness can help create a verifiable digital track record for individuals, starting from primary events such as education and work history, down to micro-credentials. This enables a comprehensive and trustworthy digital resume that can be easily verified by employers, educational institutions, and other stakeholders. Crucially, the proofs are anchored on the blockchain, ensuring their integrity without revealing the sensitive data behind them.
Innovation Proofs: For creators, Witness provides a platform to prove their innovations. Every creation and its evolution can be tracked back to its origin, establishing clear and verifiable ownership. This is invaluable for reporting milestones, whether it’s demonstrating digital scarcity to investors or showcasing progress for the next phase of a grant. The proof of these innovations is recorded on the blockchain, protecting the details while guaranteeing authenticity.
Event Documentation: Witness can be used to document significant events and updates, serving as immutable proof points. For instance, an update to investors or a key development in a project can be anchored on the blockchain, ensuring the integrity and authenticity of the information shared without exposing the underlying data.

We are excited to explore how the community will leverage Witness to innovate and create new applications. The flexibility and robustness of this system open up endless possibilities for establishing trust and authenticity in the digital world.

A backbone of Witness is verifiable credentials, which will be discussed in greater detail in an upcoming blog post. Stay tuned for more insights on how Witness will redefine digital provenance and ownership.

Witness 0xb1b032891a980655f6b2187479d11623df20ed9f5e6652e2abf60518cdeffa2e

Timestamp 2024-07-13T13:11:51.000Z

Credential eyJhbGciOiJFZERTQSIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.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.9PQoPT44SfronJ7QxeX1tUBIqscEDOJ2MmpWJFOyTFs_x3Ko_svS3MVYJw5d8Z6AYCtduvQWjABWtFPYH1RjCQ

Data Extraction