We are in 2025, a world where trusting digital information is tougher than ever – manipulated news articles or AI-generated scams. This will happen to the content published in Anytype as well.
One solution is to ensure that a published Anytype object is signed by a trusted identity, and the object’s cryptographic identifier is then published to a public registry so that it can’t be tampered. In Nostr, there is NIP-03 that allows one to timestamp a Nostr event. Additionally, similar approach has been attempted by Fox and Polygon to do verified news content.
I want this form of attestion to exist in Anytype as well. I have built a free and open source protocol, Aqua, https://aqua-protocol.org that can be summarized as (timestamping + signing) applied to versioned data. The data need to be versioned to allow us to track the history, for the purpose of transparent journalism.
For example, for this example linked object that was published as a static web page on any.org, we extract its unique identifier and content hash, then we have both to be signed by the private key of the publisher (assumed to be an EIP-191 key here for illustrative purpose)
{
"previous_verification_hash": "0xc0c665f793080d0c7e3b9ac2c7068b308c44f08bc45d064c4f0c8be2d38a485d",
"local_timestamp": "20250418114343",
"revision_type": "signature",
"signature": "0x44d9c553348d76b6003014bff4ad80163df85fc38e0ac1e8cfc485d188f1c0707d3187114ceb6776c2b55196508d46cc3733124bb07c5e7dbb854fa0072114d91c",
"signature_public_key": "0x03e62a3df4e7c249b2191d2420e95fc65edf315ba9acdc0d783c88b0476be88334",
"signature_wallet_address": "0x6B84050FDCbdaFF10A9dB85ef7821d54cab4bECC",
"signature_type": "ethereum:eip-191",
"version": "https://aqua-protocol.org/docs/v3/schema_2 | SHA256 | Method: scalar"
}
We turn this into a Merkle tree and summarize it by taking the Merkle root, then we timestamp the hash to a blockchain or a trusted timestamping authority according to IETF RFC 3161, for example, DigiCert.