Usecases

Overview

Onchain provenance has transformative potential across various industries. It creates a new dynamic for tracking the authenticity of data's origination and transformation over time. Witness enables businesses and individuals to take advantage of this new ability to achieve enhanced transparency, security, and trustworthiness in their operations.

Provenant Lazy NFT Minting (ERC721P)

Witness enables users to mint the provenance of any type and size of data on Ethereum, for free, while retaining the ability to trustlessly promote the provenance of their data into a fully stateful NFT on Ethereum.

Certain minting flows like open editions can easily be made gasless until stateful functionality is desired by the user, at which point they can gain that functionality while maintaining the provenance of their mint. Creators looking to mint first (opens in a new tab) can use Witness to capture the provenance of their content onchain, without needing to pay a single transaction fee, giving them a new way to claim its ownership.

Timely Cryptographic Artifacts For Mechanisms

Cryptographic artifacts are used to manipulate information in various ways. Schemes such as commit/reveal and authority chains may benefit from a notion of "timeliness" of their underlying cryptographic commitments. Depending on the dynamics of the scheme, Witness can take a step that would typically require an onchain transaction, and make it free.

As an illustrative example, ENS currently levages a commit-reveal scheme for allowing users to purchase new names without being frontrun. Currently the commit step involves submitting a transaction onchain, but this step could be done with Witness, with the reveal step including the proof of the commitment.

As another example, governance tools like Snapshot leverage delegatory authority chains, consisting of signatures. Witness can be used to capture the historical existance of these signatures, so they can be used to prove the delegatory status of some votes at a point in time, without needing to post the signatures onchain.

Luxury Goods Traceability

With the rise of counterfeit luxury items, Witness's provenance solution offers brands the ability to register and track products throughout their lifecycle. Consumers can verify the authenticity and history of an item before making a purchase, ensuring genuine products and protecting brand reputation.

Further Web3 integrations can build on top of the provenance to offer additional features like privacy-preserving ownership transfers or loyalty rewards.

Digital Academic Records

Academic institutions can use Witness to timestamp digital certificates and credentials. This ensures a transparent and immutable record of a student's achievements. Employers and other institutions can instantly verify the credentials, eliminating the possibility of fraud.

Privacy-preserving solutions for revealing specific facets of a credential can be built on top as well.

Supply Chain Transparency

Manufacturers and suppliers can harness Witness to provide an immutable record of products from creation to delivery. Consumers can access this data to verify the origin, ensuring product authenticity, ethical sourcing, and quality control. Beyond just a chain of custody, Witness can also be used to track the authentic history of a product's components, providing a full picture of its provenance.

More

Witness adds transparency and historical authenticity to the origination and transformation of digital data. This means that content generation, supply chains of information transformation, and data-driven business models can all benefit from Witness's ability to provide a trustless, immutable, and neutral system for private notarization of data.

Check out the concepts section for more details on how Witness works, and the architecture section for more details on how Witness can be used.