Knowledge Base

Overview

The submission window is Truestamp’s core timing guarantee: proof that data was submitted after a set of public records and before a block. The submitted-after edge rests on the item’s witnesses, the block at the head of the ledger when you submitted plus the newest observation captured from each public entropy source, whose hashes are folded into the item’s metadata hash at submission so they cannot be changed later; the latest publication time among those records is the edge. The submitted-before edge is the finalized block whose Merkle tree includes the item’s hash, and that block is later committed to public blockchains, so neither edge can be backdated. The internal window between the two ledger blocks is typically about a minute wide; the edges a stranger can confirm are set by the public sources and chains and sit wider: minutes against Stellar, and against Bitcoin tens of minutes while the day’s fee budget lasts and up to the rest of the UTC day once it is spent. Truestamp always says “submitted” and “submission window”, never “created” or “creation time”, because a proof establishes submission timing, not when content was originally made; see the sibling term creation time. The full mechanics are in the submission window concept, the fingerprint construction in the item’s composite fingerprint, and the proof structure in Merkle inclusion proofs.