Paper Trail
A blockchain-based forum that facilitates secure transmission of journalistic content from challenging locations to news agencies via a content-explorer frontend, ensuring anonymity and easy access
Created on 16th April 2023
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Paper Trail
A blockchain-based forum that facilitates secure transmission of journalistic content from challenging locations to news agencies via a content-explorer frontend, ensuring anonymity and easy access
The problem Paper Trail solves
Paper Trail is a blockchain-based news distribution social platform that solves several problems faced by traditional news distribution systems, such as censorship, government surveillance, and lack of transparency. By using blockchain it ensures secure transmission and direct sharing of media, while also providing a decentralized platform for storing and distributing news. This reduces the control of large media corporations over the dispersion of critical news. Another critical issue Paper Trail addresses is the challenge of securing sensitive information and ensuring data integrity in areas with limited internet access or unreliable communication channels, such as remote and underdeveloped regions. By helping to address the problem of information asymmetry in a fast manner, it takes a step towards educating people about the important social and political events around the world. Additionally, it provides security and anonymity to the sources of news, which is filled with threatening security breaches in our traditional news distribution model. Paper Trail accomplishes this through its unique authentication protocol and use of zero-knowledge proofs. The authentication mechanism is a multi-step process that initially involves a group of "Trusted Arbiters" (verified journalists, primary source providers, etc.), each holding an ERC-721 NFT. Anyone can request verification through the Auth Contract, with up to N "Trusted Arbiters" responding before expiration to either approve or deny the media's veracity, avoiding the distribution of misinformation and false news. In addition to this, it also uses ZKP to prevent bots and spams. Lastly, media elements submitted to the platform are displayed on an explorer page, which also acts as a social platform providing a decentralized and secure means of communication to users worldwide.
Challenges we ran into
One of the issues we've encountered during the development of the project was the lack of proper structuring. For instance, we needed to query recently uploaded documents, but we didn't have a data structure in place to do so. As a result, we spent a considerable amount of time creating gas-optimized methods, but eventually, we opted for a more effective solution.
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