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What is PressChain?

PressChain is blockchain infrastructure for journalism that needs a durable answer to a simple set of questions: who published this, what exactly did they commit to, which outlet or organization stood behind it, what evidence was attached, who contributed, what changed later and which protocol rules governed those actions. It is not a replacement for a newsroom CMS, a social network or a generic file-storage blockchain. PressChain sits beneath those applications as a verification and provenance layer.

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The problem it is designed to solve

Modern publishing is fast, distributed and easy to modify. That is good for journalism, but it creates weak points for provenance. A page can change after publication. A syndicated copy can lose attribution. A screenshot can circulate without its source. A source document can disappear. A reader may have no independent way to distinguish the original publication from a later copy. PressChain addresses those weaknesses by giving applications a common protocol for durable publication records. The protocol does not claim to decide truth by itself. Instead, it preserves the ingredients that make independent verification possible: identity, content commitments, evidence, contributors, revisions, roles, challenges and economic accountability.

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Capsules are the center of the model

A Capsule is the canonical publication record. V3 uses a bytes32 Capsule identifier and commits to content and metadata hashes while retaining author, outlet, status, timestamps and revision context. Related registries extend the Capsule rather than forcing every concern into one contract:

• contributors record co-authorship, sources and attribution
• evidence records supporting and dispute material
• revisions preserve later changes
• metadata locators connect on-chain commitments to durable off-chain documents

This architecture lets an independent application reconstruct a publication record without needing access to the publisher’s private database.

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What a hash proves

If a publisher commits to a content hash, another application can retrieve the referenced artifact and verify whether the bytes match the original commitment. That proves integrity relative to the commitment. It does not prove every statement inside the content is factually correct. PressChain deliberately keeps those concepts separate. Identity says who acted. A hash says what bytes were committed. Evidence provides inspectable support or contradiction. Reviews and challenges describe protocol participation around the record.

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Identity and authorization

PressKey is the browser-native identity and authorization surface for PressChain. Applications request an action from the user instead of collecting the user’s private key. Roles add protocol context. Current V3 protocol roles are Reader, Author, Journalist, Editor and Validator. Bond requirements and action policy can make certain state transitions economically accountable without turning every reader interaction into a privileged publishing action.

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PRESS economics

PRESS is the native economic asset used for bonds, fees, funded actions, rewards and treasury flows. The economic model uses semantic classes such as micro, standard, elevated, bond and funded. This allows an application to understand what kind of economic action it is preparing without hard-coding unapproved mainnet values. Current balances and deployments are testnet state. Planned mainnet supply is 10 billion PRESS, with a new mainnet asset and explicit launch gates. Testnet balances do not automatically migrate.

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What developers can build

PressChain is useful when an application needs publishing records that remain inspectable outside the application that created them. Examples include:

• newsroom publishing systems that create verification records alongside normal web articles
• browser extensions that show provenance and evidence beside a page
• public-record research tools that attach source documents to reporting
• syndication platforms that preserve original attribution and content commitments
• fact-checking interfaces that inspect evidence and challenge state
• Explorer experiences that turn raw transactions into readable journalism records
• archival systems that preserve revision history and media hashes
• bounty workflows that route unresolved verification work to qualified participants

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A newsroom example

Imagine a local newsroom publishes an investigation about water quality. The article remains on the newsroom’s own site. At publication, the newsroom creates a Capsule with the canonical content hash and metadata hash. The metadata points to the article and its cover image. Two reporters are attached as contributors. Laboratory reports and public-record PDFs are attached as evidence. A reader later submits dispute evidence about one source. The newsroom corrects a numeric error and records a revision. Months later, another application can inspect the complete sequence without trusting the newsroom database to preserve every historical version. That is the core value of PressChain: it makes the record portable.

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Protocol, not presentation

PressChain owns semantics such as role IDs, action classes, record relationships and canonical identifiers. Applications decide how to present those semantics. A newsroom portal can be elegant and editorial. An Explorer can be technical. A research dashboard can be dense and analytical. They can all remain interoperable because the underlying records mean the same thing.

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Start building

If you want code first, continue with Connect to PressChain and Read Chain State. If you are designing a product architecture, read Architecture, Capsules and Protocol Principles first.