Paries – The Power of Provenance & Proof
At Paries we develop systems that prove the authenticity, origin, and integrity of your critical business data and operations. In a world of increasing digital fraud and manipulation, we help organisations move beyond trust to absolute proof - allowing you to verify every step of your digital workflows while protecting sensitive information.
In today's business environment, organisations face growing challenges:
Traditional approaches rely on trust in people, processes, and third-party auditors. But trust can be compromised, and audits only provide periodic snapshots. Paries delivers continuous, automated verification that proves - mathematically and irrefutably - the integrity of your operations.
Our solutions help organisations on both sides of regulatory compliance:
Built on our Towards Zero framework, our solutions combine advanced cryptography with practical business applications - delivering enterprise-grade security with seamless integration into existing workflows for both proof generation and verification.
Real-world application of Towards Zero
Eden Consignment Tracking applies our principles of verifiable provenance to global logistics. The platform provides real-time visibility into shipments, linking each consignment to detailed carrier data and structured manifests.
Cambridge University Press & Assessment is among our valued customers, relying on Eden to track their exam material shipments worldwide with precision.
Virtual-world application of Towards Zero
The platform tracks the creation of silicon chip designs by including a FUSE based provable filesystem capability pluggable directly into a Codasip IDE userspace running in the public cloud and supporting their university programme.
Jamie Broome, CPO at Codasip, stated: "The Towards Zero's inspired secure PoC sandbox for our cloud based chip design environment, combined with its full provenance tracking and proof system, will be a game-changer. Particularly so, as legislation is introduced to mandate full provenance of design for critical infrastructure components, the system will prove to be incredibly valuable across a number of industries."
Virtual-world application of Towards Zero
Verified Vault is a next-generation Virtual Data Room (VDR) designed for highly secure document sharing, permissioning, and auditable file usage tracking.
Built on a cryptographically verifiable foundation, it ensures that every document interaction—viewing, sharing, modification, or download—is provable and tamper-resistant. This makes VerifiedVault ideal for industries requiring strict compliance, auditability, and data integrity, such as finance, legal, and healthcare.
Unlike conventional VDRs that rely on access logs and discretionary trust, VerifiedVault uses a discentralised trustless store for audit. Where miltary grade security is required VerifiedVault integrates zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and secure overlay networks to provide even deeper provable trust.
It ensures that permissions are enforced at a cryptographic level, eliminating unauthorised access risks while maintaining a transparent yet privacy-preserving record of activity. Users can define granular access controls, track document lineage, and verify compliance without exposing sensitive data.
A commissioned blueprint based on Towards Zero
At its core, the blueprint is capabilities-based and integrates a FUSE-based filesystem with seL4 for formally verified execution, coupled with a sharded IPFS-like object store that ensures efficient parallel retrieval of large AI models.
ZKP-based authentication and SCION route proofs guarantee that only authorised entities access data and that every file follows a verifiable, expected network path.
Data is protected through STARK proofs, Byzantine fault tolerance, and Merkle-DAG based metadata tracking, ensuring that AI models and their outputs remain immutable and traceable. Each model and inference is cryptographically fingerprinted, embedding integrity directly into the AI pipeline.
By combining secure storage, scalable retrieval, and transparent verification, Towards Zero redefines how AI data is stored, accessed, and proven in a trustless world.
Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technologies broadly fall into two main categories: SNARKs (Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge) and STARKs (Scalable Transparent ARguments of Knowledge). Both approaches leverage polynomial mathematics over carefully chosen finite fields at their core, but differ in their security assumptions and practical applications.
To create proofs of computation, there are several fundamental approaches:
Both approaches rely on polynomial operations within finite fields, where the choice of field is crucial for both security and performance. While traditional prime fields are common (as used in Winterfell's STARK implementation), towers of binary fields offer an alternative approach with potential performance advantages through closer alignment with hardware operations. Implementations like gnark, Neptune, and constantine provide optimised support for binary field towers. These fundamental approaches are complemented by various polynomial commitment schemes and proof composition techniques that enable different trade-offs between proof size, verification time, and trust assumptions.
At Paries, we leverage multiple implementations across this spectrum, recognising that different approaches offer distinct advantages for various use cases.
Our technology stack includes several leading implementations and frameworks:
As noted cryptographer Bruce Schneier points out, there's no good reason to trust blockchain. However Paries does believe that Blockchain should be fundamentally viewed as a decentralised public record that leverages robust, industry-standard cryptographic techniques combined with various consensus approaches to facilitate Verification by Many.
Its technological foundation makes blockchain an excellent solution for the privacy preserving public storage of data fingerprints and proofs. In short a means of publication and verification as a service. Furthermore, we should view this as a step toward a more trustworthy and automated model for audit and transparency.
Just consider the state of corporate accounting today—where the outdated practice of double-entry bookkeeping, policed by costly audit firms and shaped by management's subjective narratives, has repeatedly failed to prevent major scandals. From Enron and WorldCom to Wirecard and Carillion, these high-profile failures highlight how easily traditional "trusted" systems can be manipulated, often at immense cost to shareholders and the public.
Paries does not position itself as a blockchain company, but it does recognise blockchain's value as a transparent, immutable public ledger. When combined with our Towards Zero framework, blockchain serves as a practical tool for publishing and verifying proofs - not as a replacement for existing trust relationships, but as one component in a larger system of verification.
Polkadot's Substrate framework represents a significant advancement in blockchain architecture, offering a modular approach that allows for purpose-built blockchain solutions. For Towards Zero, our interest is specific: we require a reliable, decentralised platform for storing cryptographic proofs and data fingerprints.
The introduction of Agile Coretime in Polkadot provides an efficient access to Consensus as a Service that meets our focused needs:
This targeted use of Substrate's capabilities provides Towards Zero with the decentralised public record layer it needs, while keeping its core systems independent and focused on their primary functions.
Need to prove your compliance or verify your partners' claims? Let's talk.
