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Capsules

A Capsule is PressChain’s durable record for a piece of journalism or publishable content. It is designed to anchor the facts needed for independent verification without forcing the entire article body into contract storage. At its core, a Capsule ties a canonical bytes32 identifier to an author, content hash, metadata hash, outlet context, status and timestamps. Related registries extend that record with contributors, evidence, metadata locations and revisions.

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Core shape

The Capsule interface consumed by current V3 evidence and contributor contracts contains:
Applications should think of this as a provenance anchor, not a CMS replacement.

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What remains off-chain

Long-form text, images, PDFs, datasets and rich metadata can live at stable URIs. Their hashes let a client verify that retrieved bytes match what was committed. This is a deliberate tradeoff. Large content remains accessible through storage systems optimized for it, while protocol state preserves identity, integrity and relationships. A Capsule can be extended through separate concerns:
  • metadata locator for canonical metadata location
  • contributors for authorship, sources, contribution roles and share basis points
  • evidence for canonical and dispute evidence plus vote tallies
  • revisions for later content history
This architecture lets clients render a complete publication record without pretending all associated state has the same meaning.

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Example product

Imagine a local newsroom publishes an investigation. Its public article lives on the newsroom site. The PressChain Capsule commits to the article bytes and canonical metadata. A cover image URI and hash allow rich rendering. Two co-authors are attached as contributors. Source documents are attached as evidence. A later correction becomes a revision rather than overwriting the original commitment. A reader using an independent Explorer can reconstruct the history even if they never use the newsroom’s own website.

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Capsule IDs in routes

Treat IDs as opaque protocol identifiers:
Validate their format, but do not try to derive business meaning from the bytes unless the canonical Capsule creation algorithm explicitly defines that derivation.

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Status and lifecycle

Capsule status is represented at the protocol layer as a numeric field. Applications should resolve labels from the authority or contract version in use rather than guessing a global enum from archived code. The exists flag is especially useful in interfaces consumed by related registries. Check it before showing contributor or evidence actions.

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A Capsule is not a verdict

A content hash proves what was committed. An author signature proves who authorized the transaction. Evidence and verification state add inspectable context. None of those mechanics magically prove that every statement in the article is true. PressChain is valuable precisely because it preserves the components that allow independent systems and people to evaluate a record over time.