Trustless Provenance Trees: A Game-Theoretic Framework for Operator-Gated Blockchain Registries

Computer scientist Ian C. Moore has introduced a formal framework called 'Trustless Provenance Trees' to solve a critical flaw in operator-gated blockchain registries. These systems, which record the provenance of digital artifacts, traditionally rely on a single privileged operator to submit all on-chain registrations. This creates the 'operator trust problem'—the blockchain record alone cannot distinguish between legitimate user actions and unilateral, potentially malicious, operator submissions. Moore's solution is a dual-layer cryptographic commitment scheme derived from a single client-side secret key. This scheme cryptographically binds a user's key to both the tree's root and each unique registration ID, making it a strictly dominated strategy for an operator to falsely attribute actions. The paper proves that under standard cryptographic assumptions, this design makes honest behavior the unique Nash equilibrium, eliminating the need to trust the operator.

The framework also formally analyzes and defends against 'tree poisoning' attacks, where adversaries attempt to corrupt provenance records through fraudulent root registration or malicious child attachments. Moore proves that complete integrity requires three distinct, non-redundant mechanisms: cryptographic priority, governance cascade, and contract enforcement. The construction has been deployed as a live application called 'AnchorRegistry' on Base, an Ethereum Layer-2 network. A key technical achievement is its O(1) gas cost, which remains constant regardless of the registry's scale, ensuring economic feasibility. Furthermore, the system includes a trustless reconstruction algorithm, allowing any participant to recover the complete and verified state of the registry using only publicly available blockchain event logs, cementing its fully decentralized and verifiable nature.