Cargostak Verification

A decentralized, distributed ledger which provides the accurate origination and ownership of digital content.

Cargostak Verification uses a patented hashing and data managment process to gurantee the origin and owner of online information. By creating a vetted identity published to the blockchain, any published content is placed in a comprehensive relationship tree. Sharing your email or wallet address with others gives them the peace of mind to know your content is truly coming from you, especially during the rise of artificial intelligence.

Background

The idea for Cargostak Verification derives from the lack of trust in today’s online content. From celebrities to friends, it’s becoming hard to know what’s real. A decentralized system can help solve this by utilizing the security of blockchain wallets combined with proven KYC (know your customer) services. When users create content, the content can be placed in a relationship tree which is replicated on nodes across a network. The replicas of content make published information incredibly hard to dispute. By giving contacts a registered wallet address, the owner’s authenticity can be assured not only by their established identity, but also by the history of content they have published and shared. This mechanism of social proof leads to a community of trust where one bad actor cannot manipulate the integrity of the whole system.

Problem

Verifying the authenticity of online content is becoming increasingly difficult. AI-generated content has become highly sophisticated, often indistinguishable from human-created material, making it difficult to determine whether a piece of content was authored by a human or an AI. The proliferation of deepfakes and synthetic media further complicates this, as AI can create realistic videos, images, or audio that depict events or speech that never occurred, making it nearly impossible to authenticate the content. Bad actors can spoof any form of content which leads to an internet where no one knows what is genuine or original.

Solution

Cargostak Verification was designed to combine the reputability of compliance services, such as KYC, with the distributed immutability of blockchain. The creator’s identity is hashed and stored in Cargostak’s smart contracts to originate any content the creator may publish. When a creator does create or upload content, the content is hashed alongside the creator’s registered identity. The content is added to the creator’s history and relationship tree which can be used as social proof to ensure the content originated directly from the creator.

Once the content is hashed, the creator uses their blockchain wallet to sign the hash with their private key. This digital signature links the content to the creator’s digital identity, providing cryptographic proof of authorship. The signed hash, along with the content’s metadata and timestamp, is then recorded on the blockchain. This decentralized and immutable ledger ensures that the information cannot be altered or deleted, guaranteeing transparency and permanence as it is replicated across nodes on the blockchain network.

To verify the content’s origin, users can retrieve the content hash from the blockchain and hash the content again using the same algorithm. They compare the newly generated hash with the one stored on the blockchain and check the digital signature using the creator’s public key to confirm that it was signed by the owner of the blockchain wallet. This process verifies that the content has not been tampered with and confirms its authenticity.