Verification infrastructure for art and
adjacent ecosystems.
A canonical record where every claim carries its source, every change carries its signature, and the rules under which the system operates are public.
What the CODEX does
The CODEX holds entity records — artists, artworks, galleries, exhibitions, provenance chains, and the actors connected to them. Each field is bound to the source it came from. Each change is recorded in an append-only chain. Each public surface that renders a record is gated by source authority before the record can be displayed.
The result is a record that is hard to drift, hard to forge, and easy to audit.
How it works
| Source authority | Every claim is tied to a tier: direct communication from the entity, the entity's canonical web presence, peer attestation, peer-reviewed press, institutional databases, verified social, fact-checked aggregators, or AI inference. Higher tiers win on conflict. AI-inferred content cannot reach a public surface without human promotion. |
|---|---|
| Visibility marking | Every field carries a visibility — public, partner, gallery-internal, registry-internal, or sensitive. Default is internal. Promotion to public is explicit. |
| Audit chain | Every operation appends a hash-chained entry: who, when, what, why, prior hash, this hash, signature. Daily snapshot is timestamped by an independent third-party authority and mirrored to multiple locations. |
| Publication gate | Public surfaces query the CODEX by entity ID. They receive only fields with public visibility. They cite source on interaction. They log the render. |
What it is not
- It is not an authentication service. It does not opine on whether a work is genuine.
- It is not an appraisal service. It does not assign value.
- It is not a marketplace. It does not transact.
- It is not a blockchain. The trust mechanism is source authority and audit chain, not consensus.
The CODEX records what sources say, validated against what other sources say, with the chain of every change preserved. The opinions remain with the sources.
The covenant
The CODEX operates under a published covenant — the rules that bind both the people who write to it and the agents that operate within it. The current version is online; the version history is online; amendments are recorded and signed.
For partners and collaborators
Partner instances run as named deployments and read canonical data from the CODEX over an authenticated programmatic interface. Onboarding is by introduction. Inquiries: