Chisel

Why this project exists

Blockchains are usually presented as balances, trades, and contracts. But their durable fields can also represent publications, references, structured claims, dated records, and relationships between people and artifacts. Those records should remain readable even if a particular application, gateway, or company disappears.

Chisel separates the record from the site displaying it, the identity from the service holding it, and the code from the server delivering it. A transaction, CID, digest, or signed statement can be independently inspected, copied, indexed, and reconstructed.

What Chisel does

The Portal and transaction workbench are implemented features. Cross-chain trust and recursive IPFS reconstruction are active prototypes and architectural work, not finished universal services.

A portable trust model

1. Meet someone, scan a public QR identifier, and establish a relationship with their public cryptographic identity. A sticker is an index, not a private key or a proof by itself.
2. Publish an artifact or sign an assertion about its exact digest. The author, publisher, reviewer, contract deployer, and reader may all be different people.
3. Retrieve the same bytes from a ledger, IPFS, or another carrier, reconstruct and check them locally, and evaluate the relevant endorsements or warnings.
4. Choose locally whether to trust the issuer and what an executable artifact is permitted to do. Attestations are evidence of claims, not automatic judgments of truth.

Chisel's proposed thunder-address conventions make this legible: EVM 0x1111…1111 denotes broadcast and 0x2222…2222 denotes avoidance or warning. UTXO attestations can carry compact ASCII claims in OP_RETURN, including hash-only warnings that do not republish the subject.

Cross-chain attestation design · M64 protocol and workbench

About the author

John Rigler describes his work as systems hacking: finding useful primitives in existing systems and combining them in ways the original interfaces do not anticipate. His background bridges enterprise computing, UNIX and infrastructure work, blockchain development, and humanities research into identity and community.

Chisel grows out of a crypto-linguistic proposal he developed in 2020: a payment transaction can also be a readable, structured publication using ordered outputs, intentionally unspendable addresses, amounts, and optional data fields. Today that idea is expanding into Web3 identity, physically exchanged QR records, recoverable software, M64 dictionaries, IPFS, and user-directed trust.

The long-term vision is a web of verifiable artifacts that can be followed across chains and reconstructed without requiring a privileged host. Chisel is intended to give individuals and communities more control over what they publish, how it is preserved, and whose assertions they accept.

Project origins and technical background · What Chisel demonstrates

Get involved

I am interested in hearing from developers, infrastructure engineers, digital archivists, researchers, educators, artists, and people working on self-sovereign identity or open records. Useful contributions include protocol criticism, interoperability tests, source reviews, live demonstrations, documentation, and collaborative experiments.

GitHub issues are public. Do not include private keys, credentials, or confidential personal records. For a private discussion, request a private contact channel without posting sensitive details.