More and more businesses are waking up to a critical risk: manipulated visual content can inflict lasting damage on brand reputation, customer trust, and ultimately, the bottom line. What was once primarily a concern for news organizations has now become a pressing issue for any company using images and video to communicate—whether in marketing, internal communications, or customer engagement.
Official denials or statements may occasionally counter misinformation, but they rarely erase the lingering doubt. Today, the ability to provide consumers and stakeholders with fast, reliable tools to verify the authenticity of visual content is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity.
One of the early and leading solutions in this space is Proof Portal, designed with Fortune 500 standards in mind. It combines enterprise-grade certification with ease of deployment and use. We spoke with the team behind Proof Portal to learn more.
Can you share a bit about your background?
At DataTrails, we provide trustless provenance and decentralized transparency ledger technology developers use with simple APIs to build content authenticity solutions, and secure AI data supply chains. The Proof Portal is the result of DataTrails’ pursuit to restore confidence in digital media—by making it possible to prove what’s real and provide lasting tools to expose deepfakes.
What’s the origin story behind Proof Portal? What challenge were you solving?
An F200 company under attack from deepfakes approached us to build a solution that proves the authenticity of their digital content and defeats deepfakes. They wanted a durable solution that combines DataTrails digital fingerprinting, provenance, and transparency technology with Imatag watermarks to provide irrefutable proof of authenticity, detect misuse, and defeat deepfakes.
Businesses have seen a 1000% increase in deepfake attacks in the past 6 months intended to damage brands, harm the reputations of executives, and generate more fraud. Legacy methods based on audits and best practices traditionally used to verify digital content are inadequate in the AI era as the speed and scale of the attacks are beyond the limits of human-in-the-loop systems. We have to move quickly to adopt data authentication into the application layer.
Proof Portal is an extensible system that works with any type of digital content and metadata and is immune to metadata stripping.
We can quickly help businesses deploy content authentication solutions for their digital content, including public-facing methods with a web portal and an API that can be used to verify digital content, detect misuse, and defeat deepfakes.
We’ve seen a few businesses start to build their own public-facing portals, which are expensive and complicated and rely on new types of metadata.
With Proof Portal, we’ve not only made this significantly easier, but it also works for all types of content without having to adopt new metadata standards and with all of the legacy files businesses have today.
Proof Portal provides an entirely trustless system for proving the authenticity of data. The provenance proof cryptography and digital signing aligns with IETF methods developed for open, interoperable long-term data integrity, transparency and trust.
How do Imatag’s invisible watermarking and DataTrails’ ledger work together?
We’ve combined two powerful technologies: Imatag’s resilient, invisible watermarking and our tamper-proof provenance ledger. Imatag’s watermark embeds a signal directly into the media that survives editing and redistribution. Meanwhile, DataTrails records a signed, cryptographically verifiable receipt of the content’s origin. Together, they create an end-to-end chain of authenticity—one that’s durable, interoperable, and independently verifiable, regardless of how extenvely edited the file is.
How does Proof Portal address the threat of deepfakes and synthetic media?
The threat from deepfakes is rising fast—for all businesses and organizations. We tackle it with a practical, easy to implement approach by making it easy for responsible organization to prove what’s real using tamper-proof, trustless technology. With a deployement of Proof Portal, any company can have its own publicaly facing content certification tool to help their customer verify the authenticity of their content. In a age where everything can be easily falsified via AI, its fundamental
Who is using Proof Portal today?
Our early adopters have been larger businesses that have already experienced the damaging impacts of deepfakes to their brands and executive team reputations and need to act now.
How does Proof Portal balance transparency and privacy for sensitive content?
Proof Portal integrates with any content management system that can make API calls and works seamlessly with the existing privacy and security controls already in place. Because it comes at the tail end of the distrubution process, all documents and file processed have already been vetted for publicle distribution by the internal processes. Proof Portal can be configured to share all or only as much metadata evidence as needed in verifying their digital content.
How easy is it to integrate Proof Portal into an existing workflow?
Very easy. Proof Portal is designed to be plug-and-play. It integrates via an API into content management systems, DAMs, publishing pipelines, and more. We also offer a simple drag & drop interface for admins or content creators to use.
Do we see Proof Portal becoming a standard or is it early days?
Media authenticity and provenance standards are a very active development area right now. It’s hard to pick winners, and even harder to pick a single standard, since different threat scenarios require different technologies to solve them. DataTrails is involved with many of the leading open standards bodies in this area such as IETF, C2PA, ITU and others, to ensure we build for wide interoperability and extensibility.
Could Proof Portal become a foundation for content licensing or legal verification?
Absolutely. Because our provenance proofs are independently verifiable and tamper-evident, they’re already useful in audit trails, evidence collection and legal disputes.
If there were no limits, what do we want Proof Portal to do next?
We imagine a world where anyone—on any platform—can instantly prove who, did what, when to any digital artifact, while also detecting misuse and defeating deepfakes.
Author: Paul Melcher
Paul Melcher is a highly influential and visionary leader in visual tech, with 20+ years of experience in licensing, tech innovation, and entrepreneurship. He is the Managing Director of MelcherSystem and has held executive roles at Corbis, Gamma Press, Stipple, and more. Melcher received a Digital Media Licensing Association Award and has been named among the “100 most influential individuals in American photography”