The Synchronic Web

TL;DR

The Synchronic Web introduces a distributed, cryptographically secure system for establishing a shared, immutable history of digital information, enabling trust and provenance verification across the Internet.

Contribution

It presents a novel blockchain-based infrastructure that allows global, permissionless clients to commit and verify data with a shared, secure timeline.

Findings

Provides a permissioned notary network for data integrity

Enables arbitrary data commitments through flexible specifications

Facilitates scalable, decentralized trust mechanisms

Abstract

The Synchronic Web is a distributed network for securing data provenance on the World Wide Web. By enabling clients around the world to freely commit digital information into a single shared view of history, it provides a foundational basis of truth on which to build decentralized and scalable trust across the Internet. Its core cryptographical capability allows mutually distrusting parties to create and verify statements of the following form: "I commit to this information--and only this information--at this moment in time." The backbone of the Synchronic Web infrastructure is a simple, small, and semantic-free blockchain that is accessible to any Internet-enabled entity. The infrastructure is maintained by a permissioned network of well-known servers, called notaries, and accessed by a permissionless group of clients, called ledgers. Through an evolving stack of flexible and composable semantic specifications, the parties cooperate to generate synchronic commitments over arbitrary data. When integrated with existing infrastructures, adapted to diverse domains, and scaled across the breadth of cyberspace, the Synchronic Web provides a ubiquitous mechanism to lock the world's data into unique points in discrete time and digital space.