XXXIII

Every published text now travels through a dozen hands and programs before a reader sees it. Somewhere on that path a sentence changes, and nobody can say when. When a dispute arrives, the only evidence is a screenshot and a memory.

LPS-1 answers this with a procedure, not a promise. The work is canonicalised so that line endings, invisible marks and file order cannot change its fingerprint. Every file is hashed with SHA-256. The hashes are organised into Merkle trees by content type, and the four roots are combined into one edition root. That root is written to a public chain with a block timestamp and cross-stamped to Bitcoin through OpenTimestamps.

The word that matters is deterministic. Two honest people on two different computers must get the same root from the same files, or the whole idea collapses into argument. The reference implementation ships the normalisation rules and the tests that prove them, and this site reads the anchored roots straight from the chain so you can compare.

What it does not do is just as important. It does not decide who owns a work; it proves who anchored it first and that it has not changed since. It does not keep a file available; it makes any copy checkable. It does not stop copying; it makes plagiarism provable.

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The thirty-second way: open the JSON at /api/state. Every value carries the command that produced it. Paste the command into a terminal and you are asking Polygon directly, not us.

The two-minute way: open Polygonscan at any of the seven contract addresses, choose Read Contract, and call editionCount, latest and getIdentity. Polygonscan is independent of this site. If its answers match the page, the page is honest.

The five-minute way: clone FTHTrading/LPS-1-Reference-Implementation, run npm install, then node verifier/cli.js --path example-work. The verifier rebuilds the hashes and Merkle roots from the files and compares them with the chain. On 2026-09-09 the contract suite passed 58 tests and the pipeline suite 21 on our machine; the commands are in the evidence ledger.

There is also a free endpoint: GET /v1/verify/{editionRoot|sha256|cid}. It reads KernelV2.isAnchored and walks the kernel's editions to tell you whether your hash, root or CID is anchored, which edition it belongs to, and when.

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The seven LPS-1 contracts are not upgradeable. There is no proxy and no administrator who can swap the code. That is why the rules cannot change after the fact, and why a mistake cannot be patched after the fact either.

Key loss is therefore final. The security section of the standard says so for anchoring: lose the author key and no further editions can be anchored. There is a second consequence that a buyer of an edition token should see. RoyaltyRouter pays out by pull-based withdrawal: funds accrue in the contract until the author key withdraws them. If that key is lost, whatever has accrued is permanently stranded. The router has received and withdrawn 0.01 POL to date and holds a zero balance, so the exposure today is small, and the page now states the consequence in its Limitations.

What the design gives in return is a record nobody can quietly edit, including the people who wrote it. For a provenance standard, that trade is the point.

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Publishers are being asked whether a model was involved in a work and how. The usual answer is a line of front matter. LPS-1 gives a better one: when a model is used, the prompts are hashed into their own Merkle tree, and that prompt root is one of the four roots inside the edition root. The edition also records the model name and a hash of the prompt set.

The disclosure becomes a commitment. If someone later claims the prompts were different, or that no model was used, the root will not match. A human-only edition has an empty prompt tree and says so. A model-assisted edition has a prompt tree and says so. Either way, a reader can know, and can check.

This is the same discipline UnyKorn applies to its own reporting: every figure in the annual report family resolves to a ledger row with the command that produced it. A disclosure you cannot check is a sentence. A disclosure you can check is evidence.

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