I recently came across a series of tweets from Walrus Protocol in the first week of the new year, repeatedly emphasizing the same concept—verifiability. The post on January 5th was especially candid: 2026 will be the year of verifiable everything. At first glance, this statement might seem a bit exaggerated, but upon reflecting on the events of the past year, it seems truly worth paying attention to.

Just a couple of days ago, there was a vivid example. A certain project was involved in a scandal, with news reports flying everywhere, and everyone frantically sharing screenshots. What was the result? Within a few hours, the original content mysteriously disappeared. The project team then came out to deny the reports, claiming they were false. The journalists couldn’t produce evidence to prove they had actually published that article—everyone can Photoshop a screenshot, and web caches can be cleared by anyone. In the end, the matter was left unresolved, with everyone seemingly just passing the blame around.

How absurd is this situation? The key issue is that no one can produce real proof.

But if the journalist had used Haulout Hackathon’s award-winning project perma.ws, everything would be different. The logic of this tool is straightforward—one click to take a web snapshot and anchor it on-chain to Walrus, with the system automatically generating a proof with a timestamp and cryptographic hash. Anyone can verify what that webpage looked like at a specific moment. More importantly, the data is distributed across 121 nodes; attempting to tamper with or delete it? Unless you control all the nodes simultaneously—which is practically impossible in reality.

This goes beyond pure technology. Ultimately, it’s a trust issue. The biggest pain point of the modern internet is the difficulty in verifying the authenticity of information itself. Deepfake videos, AI-generated images, manipulated news articles—you can’t spot the flaws. Those who theoretically can distinguish truth from falsehood, like platform operators, may not necessarily be trustworthy; they each have their own vested interests. As a result, the entire information ecosystem falls into a dilemma, and no one dares to fully trust what they see.

The significance of on-chain verification lies here—it no longer relies on the endorsement of a centralized authority but instead uses cryptography and distributed storage to establish objective, traceable, and tamper-proof proofs. This approach endows the truth itself with the ability to resist censorship.