A letter from the team.

We are creators, and we work with creators. Ma’atara designed to enshrine worthwhile work for a very long time, as long as computers remain relevant, which is likely many millennia on this planet, and is built from the ground up to do multiple novel things, hence its patent.

One, is enabling zero knowledge proofs of an individual’s work — zero knowledge in the literal sense, that a person with zero knowledge of your work cannot access it or triangulate it. Your work is not replicated or stored anywhere it can be reached in Ma’atara. Only someone already in possession of the work, applying the same transformations and processes, can receive confirmation of its inception — without that confirmation being linked to you personally. Meaning, anyone can check content they hold against the provenance engine, and even if the author and original creator has not made it public in any way or identified themselves, it can be seen when it was created and registered in Ma’atara provenance, and the DID associated — with a one way contact form that does not reveal the author’s identity.

But to do this, much had to already be built, beginning with an architecture that relies on, and only operates with the bona fide proven identity and DID of the user who minted it. The cryptographic keys, present only on the user’s device are the key to all gates of the system.

Further to this, the design uses a personal chain rather than a collective one. Evidence payloads can be encrypted while the headers needed to verify sequence and integrity remain visible. The chain begins with a genesis block — Block 0 — and a Merkle root can summarise its state at a point in time. A future independently controlled witness or external ledger could record that root and strengthen the technical evidence of provenance. Its legal weight would still depend on jurisdiction, procedure, identity evidence and the records around it. Most importantly, the chain is intended to form the digital paper of the notebook in Parable and related app surfaces.

The cryptography and architecture are designed to reduce reliance on a central trust store and make unauthorised changes detectable. They do not remove endpoint, recovery, operator or implementation risk. Maintained devices, careful key custody, independent review and tested recovery remain part of the system.

We can and do work with artists and researchers and citizen scientists to enable novel uses of this technology — for example, a large body of work, observations, or content creation, can be ultimately made public, in its pristine, timestamped form in an elegant way so that the chain becomes locked — no further writes, and can be presented in a future proof way for anyone to find and enjoy and browse through.

I personally cannot think of any other modern solution created with technology since the notepad and artist’s canvas that come close to this level of integrity and beauty of purpose. It is my personal hope that this endeavour find its right audience, and prospers and flourishes as community feedback and engagement enable the Ma’atara team to really build out these potentially world changing ideas.

Thank you for your time and patronage. We hope you enjoy it here.