Digital Content Notarization Chain TrustChain: Proving Who Wrote What and When

TrustChain, jointly released by the China Electronics Standardization Institute and Ant Group, is a digital content notarization system for the Chinese-language internet. The system is connected to 22 courts across China and can generate a legally valid creation timestamp for any piece of text, image, or video within 60 seconds.

The motivation for TrustChain comes from the rising number of digital content copyright disputes. For text, images, and video, the creation time is hard to prove, leaving many original creators' rights unprotected. The traditional copyright registration process takes weeks and is expensive. TrustChain aims to shorten that process to minutes.

On the technical architecture, TrustChain is built on Ant Group's AntChain. Whenever a user submits a piece of digital content, the system hashes it, bundles the hash with the user's identity and a timestamp, and writes the package to the blockchain. Once recorded, the entry cannot be tampered with and can serve as legal evidence at any future point.

On the user experience, users paste text or upload a file in the TrustChain mini-program and the system automatically returns an electronic certificate. The certificate includes the content hash, the submission timestamp, and the user's identity. The entire process takes no more than 60 seconds. The free version allows 20 uses per month, while the professional version offers unlimited use for 29 yuan per month.

On legal effect, TrustChain has been certified by China's Supreme People's Court. In 2025, the Supreme Court issued regulations on internet court cases that explicitly permit blockchain-based preservation as electronic evidence. TrustChain was one of the first blockchain preservation platforms to receive that certification, and its certificates have already been accepted in multiple copyright disputes.

On the business model, TrustChain does not depend on government subsidies or donations. It earns revenue by providing API services to enterprise customers. Dangdang, China Literature, and The Paper have all integrated the TrustChain API to automatically preserve original content on their platforms. As of February 2026, more than 470 million digital content records had been stored on TrustChain.

On international mutual recognition, Ant Group is in talks with blockchain service providers in Singapore, Dubai, and the European Union to push for cross-border recognition of TrustChain certificates. If those efforts succeed, they will greatly ease copyright protection for Chinese-language creators overseas.

TrustChain has also drawn criticism. Critics point out that blockchain preservation cannot prevent plagiarism. It can only provide evidence after infringement has occurred. Some creators worry that over-reliance on preservation could let platforms become passive about protecting originals. Li Shunde, vice chairman of the China Intellectual Property Research Society, recommended that blockchain preservation be combined with platform-side proactive review and content filtering.

On data privacy, TrustChain pledges not to store the original content submitted by users, only the hash. Some researchers point out, however, that hash inversion attacks are theoretically not impossible, particularly for short texts. Ant Group CTO Ni Xingjun responded that the team uses salted hashing and timestamp obfuscation to mitigate risk but acknowledged the area needs ongoing attention.