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, a personal immutable chain, fully encrypted, preserves and stores all an individual’s work. It is personal, not a collective chain, minted with a genesis block — Block 0 — when the identity was minted by the user. This is the DNA of the system, and to properly affirm and crystallise forever the authenticity of that users chain, the notebook, provenance fabric and so on, forever more, a merkle root, which is a calculated proof of the chains coherence and state at any time can be lodged in a commercial chain like Ethereum. In this way, legally binding proof of provenance can be achieved if ever required. But most importantly, it forms the very paper — digital paper — of the notebook in parable, and the app surfaces themselves.

The cryptography and architecture is beautiful and also bullet proof. No central trust store that can be hacked, and no man in the middle who can take over. Of course, it runs in parallel to modern systems, and does require sterilised and maintained devices to run the app — given this, bulletproof.

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.