Knowledge Base
Browse the concepts behind Truestamp. Follow the links between concepts, or search across everything.
Tagged: submission-window
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Glossary
Chronolocation
The investigative practice of establishing when digital evidence such as a photo existed or was captured - Truestamp supports it by proving a submission window, giving evidence a verifiable existed-by guarantee while never claiming creation time.
Creation time
The moment content was originally authored, which a Truestamp proof deliberately does not attest - a proof brackets when data was submitted, and data can exist long before it is submitted, so the guarantee is always a submission window, never a creation time.
Metadata hash
The timing fingerprint, a SHA-256 hash (prefix 0x12) over the small system-generated record naming the witnesses an item was submitted after, committing to the submitted-after edge without touching user data; a bundle carries the record itself, so the hash is recomputed, never trusted.
Submission window
Truestamp's honest time guarantee, the cryptographic proof that data was submitted after a set of public records the item's fingerprint commits to and before the finalized block that includes it, always phrased as submitted and submission window, never created or creation time.
Timestamp
What a Truestamp timestamp is - a cryptographic submission window proving data was submitted after one block and before the finalized block that includes it, immutable and independently verifiable, never a creation-time claim; the first of the home page's three pillars.
Witness
A public record that already existed when a subject was submitted and that the subject's composite fingerprint commits to, opening the submitted-after edge of the submission window; the registry is the head block plus one entry per captured entropy source, plus the signing-key event.
Items
Item Lifecycle
The states a Truestamp item moves through from created to committed, plus the terminal redacted and deletion states, what each means to a user, how an item advances to committed, and how ownership governs who can act at each stage.
Submit an Item
How to timestamp data by submitting an item on the web form, JSON:API, GraphQL, console WebSocket, CLI, or an MCP agent, with every claims field (name, hash and hash type, description, URL, location, timestamp, metadata), hash mode versus plan-gated claims-only mode, and the limits that apply.
The Item's Composite Fingerprint
How an item's claims fingerprint and timing fingerprint are bound into the composite fingerprint (item_hash) so user data stays independently verifiable, the witnesses that open the submitted-after edge are committed, and authorship is deliberately excluded from every hash.
Product
Submission Window
The submission window is Truestamp's honest time guarantee, the cryptographic proof that data was submitted after a set of public records it witnesses and before the block that includes it, which is why we say submitted and submission window rather than created or creation time.
What Truestamp Proves
The affirmative guarantees of a Truestamp proof, that the exact bytes existed unchanged and that submission fell inside a submission window whose earlier edge rests on witness records the proof carries and whose later edge is committed to a public blockchain, every hash re-derivable offline.
Verification
Proof Bundle Wire Format
The self-describing JSON and CBOR wire format of a Truestamp proof bundle, the named type registry, the subject with its claims, metadata and witnesses, block maps that carry their own metadata, the block path, external commitments, the signing key event, and why nothing opaque travels.
Proof Claims by Availability
Claims matrix for a Truestamp item proof, which of eight claims (bytes existed, unchanged, both submission-window edges, signature, key binding, ledger position, entropy freshness) hold from the bundle alone, from public chains and sources, from a pinned keyring, from the ledger, or never.
The Proof Lifecycle
How a Truestamp proof comes to exist and strengthens over time as an item is submitted against a set of witnesses, committed into a block via item commitment, and that block is committed to Stellar and Bitcoin via block commitment.
Verify a Proof
Step-by-step guide to verifying a Truestamp proof bundle offline by recomputing the leaf hash with domain separation, walking the Merkle inclusion path to the block root, rehashing each carried witness, and walking the epoch proof to the root recorded on Stellar or Bitcoin.