Overview

An entropy observation is Truestamp’s record of one captured value from an external entropy source: a NIST Randomness Beacon pulse, a Stellar ledger close, or a Bitcoin block. The observation stores the raw source data exactly as published, a deterministic SHA-256 hash of its canonicalized form, and a per-observation Ed25519 signature over a composite hash that binds the observation’s id, data hash, metadata hash, and signing key id. That composite hash becomes a Merkle leaf directly in a Truestamp block’s tree, alongside the item hashes in the same block, with no wrapper record in between. Because the captured value could not have been known before the public source published it, the observation proves the block was not precomputed, which strengthens the submission window guarantee. Observations are public data readable by anyone; see entropy sources for how they are captured and verification levels for how anyone can independently check one.