Protocol · 2025–
A receipt layer for code
Etch is a cryptographic provenance protocol — authorship that survives the AI era, verifiable by construction.
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Problem
Git history is a social record, not a proof. Commits can be rewritten, authorship amended, timestamps forged — and AI-generated code makes the question of who wrote what both harder and more consequential.
Ansatz
A signing and verification protocol — a Rust core that binds authorship to content cryptographically, with an edge-deployed verification layer that answers in milliseconds anywhere.
Stand
Open-core, in active development. Core signing and verification under construction; spec being written in public as it stabilizes.
The noticing.
Through 2024 and 2025, the industry argued about whether AI writes code. The more useful question was narrower and older: when authorship matters — audits, licensing, IP disputes, security review — what is the artifact you point to?
The honest answer is: a story. Git history is testimony, not evidence. It can be rebased, amended, and forged, and it routinely is. Everyone was arguing about generation. Nobody was building the receipt layer.
A claim of authorship should be checkable the way a checksum is checkable — locally, instantly, without trusting the person making the claim.
— design note, etch spec draft
Decisions.
Rust core, not a service SDK
Verification has to be embeddable — CLI, CI, editors, build systems. A Rust core compiles to every target that matters (native, WASM) from one codebase, and keeps the trusted surface small enough to audit. Authored changes are content-addressed, signed with ed25519 against the author's key, and appended to a verifiable chain — verification is a pure function, no authority in the loop.
Edge-first verification on Cloudflare Workers
Provenance checks are read-heavy, bursty, and global. A protocol that wants to feel like part of the toolchain has to answer in single-digit milliseconds from anywhere — Cloudflare Workers beat a regional cluster for that shape of traffic.
Open-core, by principle
A provenance protocol nobody can inspect is a contradiction in terms. The core that makes claims checkable is public; what gets built on top of it is the business.
State.
Model
open-core
Core
Rust
Status
building
Weiter
A public registry, CI integrations, and the boring, load-bearing work of making the spec precise enough that other people can implement it without asking questions.