External time-stamps and daily anchors: proof you can check
Two checks let a community show a record is what it says it is, without asking anyone to take its word for it: an outside time-stamp, and a daily anchor on a ledger for Villages hosted in the EU that turn it on. Both are a better starting point than trust by assumption.
An outside time-stamp
The method is a standards-track internet specification of 2001, RFC 3161. A time-stamping authority outside the company is sent only a fingerprint (a hash) of the record: the specification requires it to time-stamp a hash and not to examine what the hash represents. It signs that fingerprint together with the time and hands the token back. Anyone who later holds the record and the token can check that the record existed, unchanged, at that moment. The Village Gateway checking program does this offline, with no account and no connection to us.
A daily fingerprint on a ledger
Where a Village hosted in the EU has turned this on, each day's Village Gateway decision receipts are folded into one daily root for that Village. That root joins the platform's daily estate root, and the anchoring built for Midnight mainnet takes only a hash of the estate root record (its date, root and previous root). An anchor tells the ledger that the root existed by that time, and nothing about the content. No request, no decision and no member detail leaves the Village. Member content, such as stories, is never anchored on the ledger.
What this does and does not show
- It shows a record is unchanged since it was signed.
- It shows the record already existed at a given time: the outside time-stamp shows this, and so does the daily anchor.
- It does not show the record was true, or that any rule was followed.
- It does not carry legal effect of itself. A court decides what weight it has.
- These are first steps. Standards, algorithms and ledgers will all change, and a record worth keeping will need re-signing over its life.
Separately, a second signature using the post-quantum algorithm ML-DSA (FIPS 204) is built into several Village record types and turned on per account. We plan to add it to Gateway receipts.
The next step is deciding what an AI agent may do before it acts, and keeping that decision in the same kind of record. That is what Village Gateway does.
Sources
Every outside fact on this page rests on one of these sources.