Knowledge Base

Overview

Truestamp is a data-integrity and timestamping service. You submit a piece of data, and Truestamp gives back a small, self-contained cryptographic proof. That proof shows two things: that your data existed in exactly that form, and that you submitted it to Truestamp within a narrow, provable window of time. The proof is portable and independently verifiable. Anyone you hand it to can check it for themselves, without trusting Truestamp, without running any Truestamp software, and without an internet connection back to Truestamp.

In short: you turn data into evidence. The evidence stands on its own, and it keeps standing even if Truestamp is offline or gone.

Why it matters

People and organizations often need to show, later and to a skeptical party, that some specific data existed at some point in the past. A signed contract, a creative work, a measurement, an audit record, a research snapshot, a written statement: all of these can lose their value if there is no trustworthy way to pin down when they were submitted and to prove they have not been altered since.

Truestamp answers that need with cryptography rather than trust. Instead of asking you to believe a company’s word about a timestamp, it produces a proof that math alone can check. Because the proof is tied to public blockchains and public randomness sources that Truestamp does not control, the evidence survives even if Truestamp itself does not. That independence is the whole point: a proof you cannot verify without the issuer is only as durable as the issuer.

The core idea

The service works in three plain steps.

1. You submit data. You can submit a fingerprint (a hash) of a file you keep on your own device, or you can submit the actual content directly when the content itself is what you want to attest. Either way, Truestamp records a cryptographic representation of exactly what you submitted. The step-by-step walkthrough is submit an item.
2. Truestamp binds it to a submission window. At the moment you submit, Truestamp takes a fingerprint of the public records that already existed: the newest reading it has captured from each public source it watches that has one, alongside the current head of its own ledger. Those fingerprints are folded into your submission, so which records you submitted against is settled then and there and cannot be changed afterwards. Your submission is then placed in a block whose contents are committed to public blockchains. That gives your data a submission window: submitted after those public records were published, and before the block that contains it. Your submission passes from a freshly submitted state, through processing, to a committed state once it is locked into that window.
3. You get a portable proof. Truestamp produces a compact proof artifact you can download and keep. The proof carries everything a checker needs to re-derive the entire cryptographic chain on their own, including, by default, the public records the submitted-after edge of your window rests on. A smaller variant leaves those records out and still verifies under the same signature.

The submission window is what makes the timing claim honest and precise. Truestamp proves when data was submitted, not when it was originally created.

Independent, portable verification

The proof is designed to be checked by anyone, anywhere, with no help from Truestamp. A verifier can re-derive the whole chain, from your submitted data all the way out to a public-blockchain transaction, purely from the proof in hand. Every value in a proof is recomputed from bytes the proof itself carries, so a checker never has to accept a number that only Truestamp could have produced, and never has to fetch anything back from Truestamp to make the arithmetic close.

You do not have to take that on faith. Truestamp publishes a public verification page: open a public item, block, beacon, or entropy observation by its identifier and read a full verification report. No account is needed to read one, and anyone can locate public items, blocks, beacons, and entropy observations to verify via the search page. For an item you can also check a local file against what was timestamped: your browser computes the file’s fingerprint on your own device, so the file itself never leaves your machine, or you paste a fingerprint you already have. The same verification can also be done programmatically or with independent tooling built by third parties, because the proof format is open and documented well enough for anyone to write their own verifier.

This portability is deliberate. A proof that only its issuer can validate is a promise. A proof that anyone can validate offline is evidence.

Who it is for

• Individuals and teams who need durable, tamper-evident records of when data was submitted and proof that it has not changed since: contracts, creative works, measurements, audit trails, compliance artifacts, research snapshots.
• Applications and services that want to timestamp their own data, or their users’ data, with a third party and later prove it offline.
• Auditors, courts, and counterparties who need to check such proofs without trusting either the person who submitted the data or Truestamp.

Use of the service is governed by the published Terms of Service and Privacy Policy; see the legal documents.

What Truestamp does and does not claim

Truestamp is precise about the boundary of what it proves, because a cryptographic proof should never overstate its own reach.

It proves that specific data existed in a specific form, that the data was submitted to Truestamp within a provable time window, and that this fits into a verifiable chain committed to public blockchains. For the full statement of these guarantees, see what Truestamp proves.

It does not prove when the data was originally created, who authored the underlying data, or anything about the data beyond the bytes themselves. For the limits, and why they matter, see what it does not prove.

Keeping those two lists honest and separate is a core commitment of the service. For help, or to report a security issue, see support and contact channels.