Introduction

Witness unlocks Web3 ownership and incentives at Web2 scale.

Anyone can use Witness to create verifiable provenance and issue digital ownership for any data without the upfront friction or cost of blockchains. This allows developers to build traditionally scalable applications that benefit from Web3 incentives such as:

  • Tokenization: NFTs, tokens, points
  • Universal Verifiability: attestations, logs, timestamps
  • Financialization: mint fees, referral fees, smart contracts composability

Overview

Witness is a hybrid offchain/onchain system comprised of the Witness API and the Witness Protocol.

The most basic user flow consists of a user submitting data and receiving a proof.

This is performed in 5 steps:

  1. Users send hashes of their data to the Witness API
  2. Witness API aggregates all user hashes into a new merkle root
  3. Witness API periodically checkpoints the new merkle root to Witness Protocol
  4. Witness Protocol's smart contract verifies the new root and updates it onchain
  5. Witness API provides a proof to the user for each submission

Witness Flow

A Witness proof verifies when Witness Protocol and the underlying blockchain(s) witnessed the submitted data.

Combining a Witness proof with the underlying data produces Witnessed data.

Anyone with access to Witnessed data can verify that it has not been tampered with since it was issued. Verification only requires access to the underlying blockchain(s), but can also be quickly queried through the API.

Check out the concepts section to understand how Witness's architecture achieves the scalability and cost benefits of traditional Web2 systems, while inheriting the trustless, immutable, and neutral properties of public blockchains.

You can also learn more about the novel use cases that Witness can empower.

Get Started

Witness is designed to be unopinionated and lightweight. Straightforward SDKs and unopinionated RPC endpoints enable a variety of integrations. A Typescript client is available for off-the-shelf use, while various smart contracts are ready to aide with programmatic consumption of provenance onchain. Check out the API section for more details.

Still have questions?

Read through our FAQ to quickly address any questions or common misconceptions.

Get in Touch

If you're interested in using Witness Protocol, we'd love to chat! Don't hesitate to contact us via Telegram (opens in a new tab).

Quick Start