Reality Registry

Check it yourself

Don't take our word for it. Take the file.

Reading a verification page means trusting our page. So here is a real sealed photo. Download it, put it through WhatsApp, and check it yourself — free, no account, and you control the file the whole way.

Download the photo See its record 4.9 MB PNG  ·  sealed 2026-08-17  ·  Polygon mainnet

Yes, it's a leaking sprinkler on a suburban footpath. We would have preferred a collapsing bridge, but nothing newsworthy has happened within walking distance of the office, and staging one would rather defeat the purpose. The dull subject is arguably the point: nothing here is set up.

Three minutes

What to do.

Step two is the one that matters. Anyone can verify a file that hasn't been touched — the hard part is proving it after a messaging app has taken it apart and rebuilt it.

  1. 1

    Verify the original

    Download the photo above, then drop it into the verifier. It should come back Verified — Original: byte-for-byte identical to what was sealed on 17 August.

  2. 2

    Now break it

    Send that photo to yourself on WhatsApp, iMessage or Instagram, and save the copy that arrives. It is now a different file — recompressed, probably smaller, with the metadata stripped.

  3. 3

    Verify the wreckage

    Upload that copy. It should come back Verified — Shared: not the original file any more, but provably the same photograph, sealed at the same moment.

Reading the result

What the verdicts mean.

Authenticity isn't a yes or no. A photo can be genuine and heavily compressed, or genuine and cropped — so the answer says which.

✅ Verified — Original

Byte-for-byte identical to the sealed file. Nothing has touched it since capture.

✅ Verified — Shared

Compressed or downscaled by a messaging app or social platform, and still provably the same photograph. This is a pass, not a warning — it's what almost everything looks like by the time it reaches you.

⚠️ Verified — Edited

Cropped, rotated or letterboxed after capture. The underlying content still matches — but the framing you're looking at isn't the framing that was sealed.

❌ Verified — Tampered

The content itself has been altered, or parts of it are missing.

❓ Not Recognized

No watermark found. Usually it means the file was never sealed with Reality Registry — most photographs in the world haven't been. It is not an accusation.

Straight answer

Where you still have to trust us.

The time window doesn't need us. The record is on a public blockchain, and the two clocks it's pinned between — the US government's randomness beacon and the Ethereum chain — are public archives that will outlive this company. Anyone can check that part with no help from anybody.

Step 3 is different. Pulling the watermark out of a recompressed copy runs our extractor. It's the same maths every time and we don't get to choose the answer, but it is a dependency on Reality Registry continuing to exist. We'd rather you heard that from us than worked it out later.

One more, because people assume otherwise: this proves a file was sealed at a particular moment and hasn't changed since. It does not prove a camera was pointed at the real world. No phone can prove that today — not ours, not anyone's.

Convinced? The app is free to start.

Ten sealed captures a month, no charge. Checking a file someone sent you is always free and never asks you to make an account.