Concepts
How Attestia Works
Protocol at a glance
High-level architecture
Attestia runs as a hybrid flow: independent scoring happens off-chain for privacy and scalability, while final outcomes and settlement anchors live on-chain for public verifiability.
Actor
Contributor
Submits media for verification and receives a finalized authenticity outcome.
Off-chain layer
Tamper-resistant store
Holds verifier attestations and signed artifacts referenced by content hash.
Compute
Aggregator module
Computes consensus score, verifier count, and confidence for each asset.
On-chain layer
Attestia contracts + EAS
Anchors submission and final aggregate attestation, then settles rewards/slashing.
1. Submit
Contributor uploads media and receives a content-addressed CID.
2. Anchor
Submission is anchored on-chain as the verification task entry point.
3. Score
Verifiers publish independent off-chain attestations during the deadline window.
4. Aggregate
Aggregator computes consensus and confidence from submitted scores.
5. Finalize
Aggregate commitment is posted on-chain as the protocol output.
6. Settle
Rewards and penalties are applied from alignment with consensus.
Core elements
Roles, attestations, stake—and why they fit together.
Two roles, one stake
After staking, a wallet registers on Base as either a contributor (media owner who registers assets) or a verifier (reviewer who scores them)—never both. The AttestiaStake contract enforces that split so the protocol always knows who may upload versus who may review.
Off-chain score attestations (EAS)
Each review is a structured score—authenticity plus deepfake-risk—wrapped in an off-chain Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) attestation. The verifier signs data that binds the content hash, asset id, scores, and a timestamp aligned with the chain clock. Anyone can verify the package without trusting opaque server logic.
Aggregate commitment on-chain
Many off-chain scores roll into an aggregate: average score, verifier count, confidence from how much scores agreed, and cryptographic hashes over the set. The contributor can then mint an on-chain EAS attestation for that aggregate—the durable public anchor—while individual scores stay in the off-chain layer in this design.
Privacy for verifiers—and what still can go wrong
If every granular verdict were its own on-chain attestation, reviewers could face retaliation, harassment, or pressure that chills honest calls, and their full judgment history would be trivially correlatable on-ledger. Off-chain attestations keep signatures binding without putting that micro-history on-chain by default.
Risks remain: any app, API, or analytics that sees wallets, sessions, or IP metadata can still deanonymize or correlate people. Privacy here is architectural—reducing unnecessary on-chain exposure—not a guarantee of anonymity.
Staking
Participants lock ETH in AttestiaStake (this proof-of-concept) before registration. Skin in the game raises the cost of spam and gives the protocol leverage when behavior crosses the line.
Rewards and slashing
The contract supports a reward pool, grants, and claims for good-faith participation, and slashing stake with an on-chain reason for serious misbehavior. In the current repo those controls are owner-operated—deliberate for the PoC—while pointing toward fully rule-governed incentives later.
Use cases
From breaking news to everyday posts.
When synthetic media can imitate reality in seconds, every context matters: editors proving diligence, creators backing a viral clip, friends sharing a photo with extra peace of mind in the group chat.
Why incentives
Participation should be rewarded—and accountable
Attestia is designed so people can contribute effort (reviewing) and take on risk (staking) in exchange for upside (rewards), while keeping mechanisms to discourage abuse (slashing).
This is the difference between a "badge" system and a protocol: incentives and accountability are part of the design, not an afterthought.