Olympus
v0.10 · pre-1.0 · setup ceremony pending

Prove the record is unaltered — including the parts you blacked out.

Olympus is a verifiable ledger for sensitive documents. The file never leaves your machine; the proof does.

Evidence workflow Build from source Read the code
Illustration — sample record not a real document

Facilities review for the third quarter was postponed at the request of , and the inspection window moved to .

Two findings from the prior cycle remain open. The responsible officer is and has not filed a response.

document root b3:9f4c…d10a
withheld passages 3 of 47 committed units
remaining units byte-identical to the sealed original
offline check passes without contacting Olympus
Blacked out, still accounted for Each unit committed separately
The problem

Four things have to be true before a document survives a challenge.

Most tools deliver one of them. A timestamp does not tell you the file was not edited afterwards. A signature does not tell you the blackouts were honest. And nearly all of it stops working the day the service that issued it goes away.

Existence

It existed then

The record can be shown to have existed at a specific moment — not merely asserted to have.

Anchored, where configured, to Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps, to the Sigstore transparency log, and to accredited RFC 3161 timestamp authorities.
Integrity

It has not been edited

Any change to the file — a byte, a date, a name — produces a different proof.

Append-only sparse Merkle ledger. Committed records cannot be quietly rewritten or deleted, by anyone, including the operator.
Honest redaction

The redactions were honest

A blacked-out passage can be shown to have removed only what it claims to remove, without revealing the withheld content.

The document is committed as many small units under a signed Merkle root; redaction blanks selected units in place, so every other unit stays byte-identical and provable.
Independent check

Someone else can check it

The other side, a court, or a reader can verify all of the above themselves — years later, offline, without asking your permission.

Two independent verifiers, in Rust and JavaScript, re-deriving the protocol rather than sharing our code. The Rust verifier covers the whole chain; the JavaScript one checks the signatures and anchor hash, and prints the Rust command for the remaining proof step.
Compared

What the tools you already know do, and where they stop.

These are good tools. None of them was built to answer all four questions about a sensitive document at once.

Tool What it covers What it leaves out
SecureDrop Receives leaked documents Does not prove authenticity, timing, or tamper status
OpenTimestamps Proves a document existed at a point in time No redaction proof; no proof the record belongs to an official set; no independent operators
Sigstore / Rekor Public transparency log Built for software, not documents; requires network access
C2PA Captures provenance at creation time Does not help with documents that already exist
Arweave / Filecoin Distributed storage Cannot be checked without going online; not redaction-aware
Olympus All four claims above, in one workflow, on your own machine Deliberately not a storage or delivery service — it publishes proof, never the document
How it works

Three steps, and the sensitive file never moves.

Seal it locally

The document stays with you

Olympus runs as a desktop application with its own embedded database — no server to trust, nothing to upload. It reads the file, splits it into small units, and computes a fingerprint for each one.

Commit the proof

Only fingerprints go into the ledger

The record joins an append-only ledger that cannot be edited afterwards, and its state is anchored outward — to Bitcoin, to a public transparency log, to timestamp authorities — so the timeline does not rest on trusting Olympus.

Hand over a bundle

They verify it without you

What you give a court, an editor, or an opposing party is a small proof bundle. They check it with an independent verifier, offline. If it passes, the document they hold is byte-for-byte the one committed to the ledger, unchanged since that moment — and the redactions are accounted for.

Limits

What Olympus does not promise.

A proof system that oversells itself is worse than none, because it stops people from looking. These are the boundaries, stated plainly.

Where to start

Pick the door that matches your job.

Journalist or investigator

You want to publish a document and pre-empt the claim that it was doctored or selectively cut.

Court & evidence workflows →

Lawyer or expert witness

You need a verification path you can put in front of a court, and one the other side can run themselves.

Independent verifiers →

Security auditor

You want the threat model and the findings from previous review rounds, including the ones that were not clean.

Threat model & audits →

Developer or contributor

You want to build it, run the test suite, and see whether the cryptography matches the claims on this page.

Quick start →
Status

Where the project actually is.

Live

Desktop application, append-only ledger, redaction commitments, credentials, and the offline verifiers.

Live

External anchoring to Bitcoin, the Sigstore transparency log, and RFC 3161 timestamp authorities, once an operator configures them.

Pending

The multi-party trusted setup ceremony — the last gate before v1.0, run by several independent parties so no single one of them, us included, can forge proofs.