In today’s digital era, most people generate and maintain documents as digital artifacts. However, since users can generate fake documents, it becomes hard to verify their authenticity and integrity. Blockchain technology addresses this problem by providing ownership, authenticity, and immutability of documents or any other type of data recorded on the blockchain. Authorized users can verify the integrity or authenticity of this data by providing a unique identifier such as a transaction ID or a cryptographic hash.
When businesses or content creators record data on the blockchain, they need the ability to prove “Proof of Existence” authorship to avoid losing or altering the original file. PoE is all about recording and proving that a certain digital entity exists- by providing a timestamp and signature associated with it.
Igor, an engineer and stakepool operator with over 15 years of experience as a solutions architect and developer, has created CardanoWall. CardanoWall is a platform that allows authors to anonymously prove the authorship of PoE. It also encrypts files in a browser and stores a copy in the CardanoWall public storage.
What is CardanoWall?
CardanoWall is a service built on top of Cardano that allows you to effortlessly send messages to the Cardano blockchain, without delving into the technical details. You can simply congratulate someone for their birthday or anniversary, speak about yourself, or share some thoughts. Your message will stay on the Cardano blockchain forever and nobody can change or delete it.
The most logical application of CardanoWall is to provide a digital signature or concrete proof of existence of your documents. You can simply select files on your computer and the browser will calculate their unique hash sums. If you send those sums to the blockchain, this will be proof that such a document already existed at the moment of sending the message.
Roadmap for Developing CardanoWall
Igor, the engineer behind CardanoWall, is rolling out the solution incrementally. By the time of writing, the solution had phases 1, 2, and 3 already implemented, with new features and levels of PoE under development for the planned phase 4 rollout. Below is a quick summary of the development status of the CardanoWall service.
Level 1
In this phase, the developer implemented the concept of Proof of Existence. For every transaction, a hash value of a file or any other digital data is included. Since the data cannot be changed once recorded on the blockchain, nothing can be added retrospectively, and this hash value cannot be faked. This means that a message with a hash value is sufficient proof that your data existed when the message was sent. The Cardano blockchain acts as a public cryptographic notary that is impartial and inflexible. The algorithm for obtaining a hash sum is a one-way function. You cannot get back the contents of your data from it, and you do not disclose the contents of the data to it.
Level 2
The proposer went further and added several new layers to the underlying idea of “Proof of Existence”. Utilizing cryptography capabilities, you can now use CardanoWall to anonymously add a digital signature to your Proof of Existence. If necessary, you can prove that the data is yours, you are the owner of the private key and the author of the signed message.
Level 3
While more features are still under development for level 3, CardanoWall leverages the same solid cryptographic techniques to allow you to encrypt your data and store it on the public internet. Only you, as the private key owner, can decrypt the data or get a password to decrypt it. In case of data loss, you have the option to recover the data. Since each file is encrypted with its secure password, you can share the password from a specific file.
Working with keys, encrypting, and decrypting data occurs exclusively on your browser. The keys and the content of the original data are never transmitted to the server, so the encryption and hashing algorithms are reliable and safe to use.
Here’s a video that provides a quick run-through of CardanoWall and how it works.
These CardanoWall capabilities will help in the protection of intellectual property rights. Whether you’re an artist, book author, designer, photographer, musician, or even a business working with important documents, CardanoWall can help you create a concrete proof of your work.
Level 4 (in progress)
Under development are additional features that will leverage a fourth level of PoE to enable secure and encrypted communication between parties or additional applications on the Cardano blockchain. Once done, the feature is set to bring more real-life usage to CardanoWall. Businesses, for instance, can use the service to provide bonus materials tied to a purchased product with an included private key.
Project Funding
The project owner has been working on the back-end and front-end development as well as marketing initiatives all by himself. He invests back all the profits from his [VICE] stake pool in the development of CardanoWall, as per the stake pool pledges. Igor is therefore requesting a funding amount worth $40,000 to allow him to hire more partners and allocate more time to the CardanoWall project. Here is a quick breakdown of the project costs:
| Task | Breakdown of funds usage | Costs |
| Back-end development | Hiring additional senior JS developer, independent security auditor, and cryptography/cybersecurity specialist | 35000 |
| Front-end development | UX/UI improvements for new features | 2500 |
| Infrastructure | One year costs for production, development, and API servers, storage servers, and crawlers for page PoE | 3000 |
| Marketing | Professional materials for onboarding businesses such as explainer videos, online ads, and social networks promotions | 17000 |
The project owner would also be grateful to receive additional support from IOHK experts and the larger Cardano community in the form of mentoring in cryptography, which notably takes a large part of the CardanoWall project.
A plethora of salient use cases with third level PoE
At its core, CardanoWall is built on one of the main goals underpinning blockchain technology- the ability to maintain a non-repudiated log of actions. Other than protecting intellectual property, the CardanoWall service offers a solution to more human problems that tend to be less abstract. People can easily send messages to the Cardano blockchain or use it as an NFT platform to protect their artwork, all without worrying about the technical bit. And the beauty of it lies in using what can be viewed as a decentralized anonymous Twitter or Instagram built on the Cardano blockchain. Once fully developed, the application scenarios for this platform will be far-reaching.
For more information about the CardanoWall project, please have a look at their official website or check out their Fund 5 project proposal as submitted to Project Catalyst using the link below: https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/CardanoWall-new-levels-of-PoE/350923-48088
