One human, one account — on a decentralised network where creators hold their own keys and published work carries its origin with it.
The problem
Open any social feed and you cannot establish two basic facts. Is there a person behind this account? And was this video filmed by a camera, or produced by a model?
Both questions used to answer themselves. An account took effort to maintain, and video was expensive to fake. Neither is true now. Automated accounts are cheap to run at scale, and generated video has become convincing enough that the eye is no longer a reliable test.
The usual response is detection — algorithms guessing after the fact whether something is real. Detection is a losing position: it improves only as fast as the thing it is chasing, and it is wrong in both directions, flagging real work and missing fakes.
PROV takes the other approach. Rather than guessing afterwards, it records what was true at the moment of creation and carries that record with the work.
The approach
One human, one account. Not an email address and a checkbox — a ladder that begins with ordinary sign-in and rises through a period of camera-direct posting to in-person attestation, where verified members confirm you exist by meeting you.
An attack that requires physical attendance by real people costs more than it can return.
Your signing key is generated inside your phone's secure hardware and never leaves it. The server never holds your private key, and never holds your password in the clear.
When you publish, your phone signs the work. That signature is what proves authorship — not an entry in a database someone else controls.
Every published work carries a declared origin, from camera-captured through to fully generated, written to a tamper-evident ledger at the moment of publication.
The declaration is permanent. It travels with the work and cannot be quietly revised later.
Status
PROV is being built in New Zealand by PROV Protocol Limited. It is not yet open to the public, and there is no sign-up.
The identity layer, the trust ladder, the attestation ledger, content storage with creator-declared provenance ratings, encrypted drafts, hardware-backed publishing, moderation and account recovery are built and verified. The distribution network and the mobile applications are in progress.
If you want to know when it opens, or you are a creator, researcher or operator with a reason to talk sooner, get in touch.