Re: [PROPOSED WORK ITEM] Cryptographic Event Log

> Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
>> Christopher and Wolf, Provenance Marks seem very close to what CEL is
>> trying to do. I'm most curious about the pre-commitment approach that
>> PMs use. It feels like we might be able to combine CEL/PMs or at least
>> re-use some of the functionality from PMs in CEL. Ideally, for me,
>> we'd join forces and merge the two but I'm saying that without
>> understanding every technical decision made in the PM spec.

Hello Manu,

As you mentioned, we did do a comparison between CEL and Provenance Marks (PM) that group members may wish to review:

https://hackmd.io/@bc-community/HycjswAIyx

Our video introducing Provenance Marks is here, which is a re-presentation of the talk I gave to the W3C CCG on June 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKAK6j4mqgE

The deck from that presentation is here:

https://developer.blockchaincommons.com/assets/pdfs/2025-06-provenance-marks.pdf

Our core paper and specification for PM is here:

https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/Research/blob/master/papers/bcr-2025-001-provenance-mark.md

We’re happy to meet with anyone who has questions regarding PM, and we’d certainly be happy to discuss joining forces. I encourage anyone who would like to have that sort of conversation to book a spot on my calendar:

https://calendly.com/wolfmcnally/30min

The key concept of forward commitment is, as I mentioned in the talk, not original and can be freely used by anyone. And as I mention in the CEL-to-PM comparison, PM can easily be extended to encompass the features of CEL, as it is designed as a foundational yet flexible building block for larger systems. The main point of difference I think is PM’s use of compact binary structures augmented by deterministic CBOR (dCBOR) which opens it up to use much more sophisticated formats like Gordian Envelope.

I look forward to future conversations.

~ Wolf McNally
Lead Researcher, Blockchain Commons

Received on Thursday, 24 July 2025 01:56:18 UTC