Canon Event

Canon Event: A Protocol for Permanent Truth Canon Event is a decentralized knowledge protocol designed to build an immutable, community-owned repository of human knowledge. It serves as a censorship-resistant alternative to centralized encyclopedias, which are vulnerable to opaque governance and economic instability.

Our solution moves beyond a fragile donation model by instituting a self-sustaining crypto-economic engine that systematically rewards all participants for generating and validating high-quality, verifiable information.

The Problem Centralized knowledge platforms suffer from systemic flaws that threaten the integrity of their content:

Governance is Off-Chain and Permissioned: Editorial control rests with a small, opaque group, lacking true community consensus.

Knowledge is Mutable: The content layer is susceptible to alteration or deletion, as it lacks on-chain, permanent storage.

Incentives are Broken: The model relies on goodwill, failing to provide a direct economic reward for time-intensive work like specialized creation or rigorous fact-checking.

The Solution: A Trustless Architecture Canon Event resolves these issues through a dual-layered, decentralized architecture:

Immutability Layer (IPFS/Lighthouse): Every proposed article edit is uploaded to IPFS, and its permanence is guaranteed by Lighthouse. The resulting unique Content ID (CID) serves as the permanent, content-addressed reference for the edit.

Logic & Value Layer (Hedera EVM): Our Solidity smart contracts, developed with Hardhat, are deployed on the Hedera EVM. This provides a core consensus and value layer with fast, low-gas fees that are essential for supporting our transaction-heavy economic model.

The Canon Economic Engine (Three-Role Model) Our system is defined by direct, transparent incentives for three key roles:

The Creator: Proposes new knowledge. They are rewarded with on-chain assets upon acceptance of their work, directly linking effort to payment.

The Reviewer: Validates proposals by staking native assets. They earn a return on their stake for voting with the consensus but face slashing penalties for voting incorrectly, thereby creating a strong incentive for honest validation.

The Contributor: Directs the growth of the knowledge base by funding specific "Knowledge Bounties." This proactive financing ensures the community focuses its efforts on high-priority topics.

By rewarding every value-generating action on-chain, Canon Event transforms the passive consumption of knowledge into an active, self-governing economy that establishes verifiable truth.

Our core design principle was to solve the economic and performance challenges of decentralized knowledge, making the system fast and affordable enough to run a micro-reward economy at scale.

The Technology Stack & Integration We pieced together specialized tools for maximum efficiency:

Logic Layer (Hedera EVM & Hardhat): The entire protocol logic resides in a suite of Solidity smart contracts and was developed using Hardhat. The contracts are deployed to Hedera's EVM.

Storage Layer (IPFS & Lighthouse): We use IPFS for content storage. When a Creator submits an edit, the content is uploaded to IPFS and pinned using Lighthouse, guaranteeing its permanence and generating a unique Content ID (CID).

Front-End: The user interface manages the dual flow: sending content to IPFS and initiating transactions to Hedera via a wallet connector.

The Canon Event Workflow The creation and validation of knowledge follow a precise, immutable workflow:

Proposal: The Creator uploads their content to IPFS via Lighthouse, receiving a permanent CID. They then initiate a transaction on the Hedera EVM, passing this CID and their stake to the smart contract.

Validation: The Reviewers retrieve the content using the CID. Their vote is cast as a separate, low-cost transaction on Hedera.

Finality: Smart contracts (built with Hardhat) automatically calculate consensus, distribute rewards to successful Creators and Reviewers, and execute slashing penalties for dishonest votes.

Benefits of Partner Technologies Our chosen partners were critical to making the project economically feasible:

Hedera: The multi-stakeholder model requires millions of micro-transactions (votes, stakes, payouts). Hedera's fast, low gas fees are the only reason this system is economically viable at scale.

Lighthouse: It solves the persistence problem inherent in IPFS. Lighthouse guarantees that once an article is submitted, it is permanently pinned, ensuring the knowledge is truly censorship-resistant and unerasable.

Hardhat: Allowed us to rapidly iterate and rigorously test the complex economic logic of staking and slashing under hackathon time constraints.

Notable Hack Our most notable implementation was the integration strategy of IPFS and Hedera. We minimized Hedera's storage burden by only storing the immutable IPFS Content ID (CID) on the blockchain. This separation of heavy data storage (off-chain) from the transactional and governance logic (on-chain) ensures the protocol remains fast and achieves extremely low transaction fees, validating Hedera's strength as the core consensus layer.

Funny Note: The only thing faster than our protocol on Hedera is the speed at which a Reviewer changes their vote after realizing they might get slashed. We're building a decentralized encyclopedia, but also accidentally a decentralized consequence engine!