We’ve been thrilled by the response to our case study on Sam Spratt’s The Monument Game. Communities, curators, and galleries have reached out to see how they could leverage Atomic Lore to move their own stories, history, and provenance onchain. We then wrote a followup article specifically on this value proposition for curators and art managers in the NFT space.

The good news is that anyone can begin using Atomic Lore today! Simply go to an individual NFTs page, pick the template, fill out the form, and sign an attestation.

However, the challenge isn’t in creating a few individual records in Atomic Lore. That’s easy! The challenge for many is the time and effort to import dozens, hundreds, or thousands of records at a time. These practical, workflow challenges prevent most NFT curators from even getting started.

We’ve worked hard the last few months to create an elegant solution to this problem. And we are thrilled to announce this is no longer an issue now that we have Atomic Lore’s rollup attestation feature.

Manual Attestations Don’t Scale

Attestation is an invaluable tool for creating verifiable provenance for a piece of art. The process is reasonably simple: To attest a proof of exhibition (PoE), the artist and the curator provide cryptographic signatures about a document or claim. One party signs the proof document, and the other party countersigns it. Everyone can retrieve the signing keys from either party’s wallet and verify the authenticity of the proof.

Now think of an exhibition with hundreds of pieces, probably from multiple artists. How can a gallery sign the PoEs for all pieces without expending unreasonable effort and time? Manually signing individual PoEs does not scale well for three reasons:

1. Time: Manually signing a PoE takes a certain amount of time. And even if you have all the data ready in a spreadsheet, it’s still time intensive.

2. Quality: Repeated manual tasks are almost always a source of increased failure rate. If someone has to sign hundreds or thousands of PoEs, mistakes are inevitable.

3. Security: A signing party may want to delegate the bulk signing to another person, another wallet, or an online service. However, a valid signature requires the signing party’s secret key. Giving away your secret key is extremely risky, even if you fully trust that person or service. After all, mistakes happen—see point 2. Moreover, exposing your secret key to others breaks the chain of trust, no matter whether the third party actually uses the key for unauthorized signing.

These are three fundamental obstacles to scaling manual signing, and there is no way around them—that’s why they are fundamental. To manage signing at scale while taking on only a reasonable burden of time and effort, we will need to find a different way.

Moving away from individual signatures

To handle the mass signing of hundreds or thousands of PoEs, the signing process must be simplified and made faster—much faster!—without sacrificing quality or security.

A scalable attestation service must combine several features:

• It must be decentralized for true scalability with no single point of failure and no intermediaries for verification.

• It must not introduce any trust assumptions that replace real trust

• It must not have any security gaps

• While fulfilling all of the above, it must still serve all the business requirements of its users

Attempt #1: one-dimensional scaling

A first naive attempt at scaling the signing process is linear scaling. Take hundreds of PoEs and pass them to an intern (along with plenty of Red Bull) or to a tool or an external service for signing the PoEs one by one. This is a simple and straightforward solution, but unfortunately, it has severe drawbacks.

1. The process is still serial. While it is more convenient than signing each PoE separately, it does not speed up the signing significantly, so this solution's scalability has a natural limitation: time.

2. The signing and countersigning parties must still expose their secret keys to a person, a tool, or a service to perform the bulk signing. You don’t want your intern stealing or leaking that key due to poor OPSEC.

To escape the dead-end of serial scaling, we have to take an orthogonal approach.

Attempt #2: roll-up attestation

What if we could sign an arbitrary number of PoEs with a single signing step? Obviously, we can’t simply string all the PoE documents together and sign them as a big, single document. Verifying the signature for any of the included PoEs would become a slow and tedious process. You would have to find all other PoE documents included in the signature, concatenate them, and get the hash digest to compare with the signature.

Luckily, there is another way. We can use a technique that is already used to speed up blockchain transactions on L2 rollups.

Verifying transactions on a blockchain is a rather slow process due to some inherent system characteristics. A smart way out of the inherent limitations is the use of level-2 blockchains that can process transactions in parallel to the level-1 blockchain they were built upon, thus taking the load off the level-1 chain. When enough transactions have been processed, the processed transaction data is rolled up to a single hash value and transmitted to the level-1 chain as a single transaction. The level-1 chain validates this transaction, and this validation can be used as proof of the level-2 transactions.

This roll-up mechanism for transaction is ideally suited for the highly scalable signing of many attestations.

Roll-ups at a glance

Before looking into use cases and benefits, let’s briefly examine the mechanics of roll-up attestations.

From a user’s perspective, the process includes four steps:

1. The user uploads data (proof of exhibition document, off-chain history, etc)

2. Atomic Form rolls up the data into individual and a global content identifiers (CIDs).

3. The user approves the roll-up by signing an attestation containing this roll-up CID.

4. Atomic Form derives individual attestations for each document.

(See the diagram below.)

How do roll-ups work in detail?

If you have heard of Merkle Trees, you may already have an idea of how roll-ups work. The Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS), for example, uses Merkle Trees to create attestations for private data. In a nutshell, an arbitrary number of documents builds the leaves of the Merkle Tree, and their hash representations are iteratively condensed into a single hash value at the root of the tree.

Our roll-up mechanism builds upon the same idea while being simpler and requiring fewer iterations than building a Merkle Tree. Here is a brief description of how we construct roll-ups from proofs of exhibition.

Step 1: You upload

At the start of the roll-up process, there are several proofs of exhibition (PoE) or other offline records requiring attestation. The user uploads them in Atomic Form (one record per row in a CSV file).

Step 2: We roll up

In the roll-up phase, Atomic Form takes the uploaded data, creates individual records for each, and then creates a roll-up file that combines them into a single content identifier (CID). This happens in two steps.

1. Calculate the CID of each uploaded document. Cryptographic hash functions allow for calculating a relatively short value from a much longer document. Virtually every document someone can create has a unique hash value. In other words, this hash value unambiguously identifies the document it was created from. Change a single bit of the document, and the hash function delivers an entirely different hash value. We use this cryptographic hashing to create a unique CID for each document.

2. Concatenate all CIDs into a single document. If you can calculate a CID from a document, you can calculate a CID from other CIDs as well. So in this step, Atomic Form takes all the CIDs from step 1 and concatenates them. Now we technically have a new document from which we can calculate another CID. This CID uniquely identifies all the PoE documents at once.

In this diagram, the roll-up phase occurs in the “We rollup” step, resulting in a single “Rollup Metadata CID” in the “You approve” step:

Step 3: You approve

At this point, all you have to do is to sign a message containing the rolled-up hash value with your wallet. Whether you uploaded ten documents or 1,000 documents, signing them requires only one step.

Step 4: We derive

The last step ensures that each individual document receives a separate attestation, derived from the roll-up attestation. Granted, the roll-up attestation already covers all the individual documents, but if each document has its own derived attestation, it can be individually reviewed and countersigned. A chain of trust is maintained by pointing each derived attestation back to the parent, roll-up attestation where it derives its authority from.

The following diagram visualizes steps 3 and 4 in the third layer:

Because building hash values is way faster than manually reviewing and signing each cryptographic signature, roll-ups are a massive time saver while retaining all the flexibility for validating individual PoEs.

The ingredients already exist: IPFS and IPLD

In the above process description, we used the term “content identifier”, or “CID”, for hash values taken from documents. You may have heard the term “CID” before. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and the Interplanetary Linked Data model (IPLD) use CIDs for managing documents. IPFS and IPLD are tested and proven models for content-addressable data. Atomic Form’s roll-ups make use of IPFS and IPLD technology to design a roll-up attestation based on established and future-proof web3 standards.

Note the similarity between CIDs and the hash values in the attestation roll-up description. A CID of an IPFS document is precisely the hash value we can use for a roll-up. So with IPFS and IPLD, we can design a roll-up attestation based on established and future-proof web3 standards.

Use Case: How to quickly and securely sign hundreds of Proofs of Exhibition

The main use case for roll-up attestations is the mass signing of proofs of exhibitions or Tweets. Roll-up attestation enables galleries to escape the tedious process of signing each PoE manually, while artists still have individual attestations available for each of their NFTs. It’s a win-win.

With Atomic Form, this process works as follows:

1. The gallery signs a roll-up of all PoE documents of the exhibited works. By the nature of the roll-up process, each PoE document is now signed and verified.

2. Atomic Form derives individual attestations from the signed roll-up attestation. With an Atomic Form wallet, we sign the individual documents with a back-reference to the rolled-up, gallery-signed hash value.

3. Every artist whose NFTs were exhibited (and thus are part of the roll-up) can countersign the derived attestations for their works to make the proof validation complete.

Roll-up attestations have advantages for both the galleries and the artists.

Galleries can save a lot of time and effort, especially if the exhibition is large. Moreover, the roll-up underscores that all the included NFTs were part of the same event. A roll-up of an entire show is therefore also a historical record of the show, listing all NFTs that were exhibited in the show.

Artists can collect individual evidence for the NFTs in their portfolio from the derived attestations and countersign the gallery-signed PoEs to improve the overall spectrum of proof.

Use cases beyond proof of exhibition

Roll-up attestations are not limited to proofs of exhibition. There are more cases where roll-ups can prove beneficial.

• Collectors may decide to provide attestation for all NFTs in their possession or after obtaining a large number of NFTs.

• If an online community submits dozens or hundreds of attestations, artists or collectors can co-sign them in one step.

• Social media posts about an NFT are part of the NFT’s lore. Roll-up attestation enables artists to collect dozens of posts and sign them in one step.

• If artists want to moderate numerous NFTs, like bulk-revoking them, they only need a single signature.

• Any bulk import of off-chain data, such as data from a spreadsheet or a database, can be rolled up and signed once.

• Data from multiple sources can be mixed and matched as long as you can create a CID for each data entity.

This list shows how versatile roll-up attestations are, and the future may reveal even more use cases.

Who uses roll-up attestation already?

Although we’re currently in a closed beta, we already have flagship users who took advantage of roll-up attestations.

OneLoveDAO

OneLoveDAO is a passionate community of artists built to provide a place for connecting, teaching, learning, and supporting each other. They did an extraordinary job at NFT NYC 2024 ensuring that every artist's work was on display (even video recording each exhibition to capture proof). To commemorate the event for all these works, OneLoveDAO worked with Atomic Form to sign PoEs via roll-up attestation.

Superchief Gallery

Superchief Gallery NFT is an international group of galleries with a massive show history, working for notable customers like Christie’s, OpenSea, and UNICEF. When they faced the task of backfilling attestations for thousands of already exhibited NFTs, they opted Atomic Form’s roll-up attestation service. If these attestations were done manually, at 5 minutes per attestation, they would have taken a staggering 250 hours, or one and a half months (at an 8-hour working day and 20 working days per month). Using Atomic Form for doing roll-up attestations can reduce that time by 50 to one, down to a mere 5 hours.

The time savings were immense in both cases. Large events will continue to take place, and roll-up attestations will play an increasingly important role in capturing provable exhibition history.

Save Time While Not Sacrificing Security

Roll-up attestations are a powerful and versatile mechanism for efficiently signing large amounts of structured attestations. Primarily created for, but not limited to, mass-signing proofs of exhibition, roll-up attestations shine whenever bulk data requires verification by one or more parties. Atomic Form’s roll-up attestation service is fast, secure, and convenient, and saves you time, your most precious resource.

Roll-up attestations are currently in beta. If you'd like to be one of the first beta users, get in touch with us.