Site Integrity Heartbeat
A prototype for a non-human steward that vouches for content-addressed resources
Every day, a non-human agent checks the current content address (CID) of amykellam.com via its DNSLink and publishes a signed, timestamped attestation of that CID. The log is stored as a JSON file in a public GitHub repository and served via GitHub's raw CDN. Anyone can verify the cryptographic signatures using the agent's public Ethereum address.
How it works
- 1 · Resolve The agent fetches the current CID of amykellam.com via DNS TXT record.
- 2 · Sign “Agent loading… witnessed CID at a specific time.”
- 3 · Append The attestation is added to the log array, keeping the last 365 entries.
- 4 · Commit The workflow commits the updated log.json to the repository's main branch.
- 5 · Serve This page fetches the raw file and displays the log below.
Why this matters beyond this site
The heartbeat agent is a minimal, working prototype of a larger idea: a non-human, unowned steward that can vouch for any content-addressed resource. Because the agent can have its own on-chain identity and reputation,† its attestations carry weight — it has a public, verifiable track record of honest behaviour. The same simple architecture can be applied across a wide range of use cases, such as those outlined below.
Scholarly publishing & institutional repositories
Pre-prints and published articles are stored on university servers or commercial platforms. The link between a specific version and its publication date relies on platform metadata, which can change without notice. An institutional heartbeat agent resolves the IPFS CID (or DOI-to-CID mapping) of every deposited paper daily, publishes signed attestations of each version's integrity, and maintains a per-paper attestation log. Multiple agents — one run by the journal, one by the library, one by an independent consortium — can watch each other, creating a web of mutual verification without any central platform.
Open source & supply chain integrity
A binary release should correspond to a specific source commit, but verifying this often requires manual hashing and trust in the release platform. A build-witness agent watches a repository's release page (or an IPNS-published directory). For each release it downloads the binary and the source snapshot, reproduces the build in a deterministic environment (where possible), computes the content hash of both, and publishes a signed attestation: “Commit X produces binary Y when built with compiler Z”. Even a simpler variant — attesting only that a specific binary has a specific hash at a specific time — provides a tamper-evident release history that developers and users can check independently.
Legal evidence & public notarisation
A person needs to prove that a document existed at a particular time and has not been altered. Centralised notary services involve fees, intermediaries, and jurisdictional lock-in. A public-notary agent accepts only the hash of a document (never the document itself) and signs an attestation: “Document with hash X was witnessed at time Y”. The document remains entirely private; the proof is public. Anyone can query whether a specific hash was attested by the agent at a specific moment — a decentralised, permissionless alternative to traditional notarisation.
Cultural heritage & community archives
Community-maintained archives — for Indigenous knowledge, activist documentation, or oral histories — face two structural challenges: volunteer-dependent infrastructure (servers, backups, metadata) and unsuitable legal frameworks (copyright assumes individual ownership and commercial exploitation, which misaligns with collective care). A stewardship agent monitors the IPNS record of the archive, checks whether the content is still available via a public gateway, and records any changes to the CID. Each day it publishes a signed attestation: “As of date T, the archive's root CID is X; it has [not] changed since the last check.” These attestations are public, verifiable, and require no copyright claim, no access fee, and no platform account. The community retains full control.
DAO governance records
A DAO passes proposals through a combination of on-chain smart contracts (which handle voting logic, quorum, and execution) and off-chain platforms (such as Snapshot or Discourse) where proposal text, discussion, and signaling occur. While the core voting mechanism is sometimes recorded on-chain, the full context of the proposal — its text, attachments, and community feedback — often lives solely on these external platforms, which can fail, censor, or lose data. To mitigate this, a governance-witness agent captures this off-chain content as a content-addressed record, signs an attestation linking it to the on-chain proposal ID, and publishes the result to IPFS. The attestation is independently verifiable, permanently archived, and maintained by a neutral, non-human steward — preserving the governance record even if the original platform disappears. This transforms DAO governance into a cryptographically auditable archive that does not require trusting any single platform or entity.
The four-part architecture is identical in these examples: a content-addressed resource, a non-human attester with an on-chain identity, a signed attestation published to IPFS, and a public, reputation-building log.
Daily heartbeat log last 30 days
| Date (UTC) | Witnessed CID | Agent address | Signature (prefix) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loading log from GitHub… | ||||
The complete log is available at raw.githubusercontent.com/hotscotchbonnet/heartbeat-log/main/log.json.
Verify an attestation yourself
The agent's public address is loading….
Click “Verify” next to any entry to check its signature in your browser.
← Back to the main Content Attestation page for a conceptual overview and off-chain demo.
† In this prototype, the agent has only an on-chain identity (Ethereum address). A full reputation system — where agents post bonds, are challenged by peers, and lose stake for signing false claims — is achievable using this architecture. Without it, trust is still social and off-chain, but the cryptographic log provides a tamper-evident foundation upon which on-chain reputation can later be built.