How it works
How a note is kept, and how to check it yourself.
ArkNote is built so a note outlasts us. You don’t have to trust this company’s survival. You can recover and verify any note on your own, with the identifier on your certificate.
What “preserved permanently” means
Every sealed note is written to Arweave, a public archive designed to hold data for the long term without depending on any single company, including ArkNote. A note is written to that archive before we consider it sealed.
Each note has a transaction ID: a 43-character identifier that never changes and belongs to that note alone. It is on your certificate and in the footer of the note itself. With it, anyone can find the note, with no account and no permission from us.
Recover a note without ArkNote
If arknote.org is ever offline, the note is still there. Put its transaction ID after any Arweave gateway address and open it in a browser:
You’ll get the note’s original file: a small document holding the title, the words, the author, and the date exactly as they were sealed.
Check the words are authentic
When a note is sealed, we record a sha256 fingerprint of its exact file: a short code that changes completely if even one character changes. Your certificate lists this fingerprint. To confirm a copy is genuine:
- Download the note’s file from a gateway (the links above).
- Compute its sha256 hash. On macOS or Linux:
shasum -a 256 <file>. On Windows:certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256. - Compare the result with the fingerprint on your certificate. If they match exactly, the words are authentic.
What no one can do, including us
A sealed note cannot be edited or removed by anyone: not the author, not a recipient, not ArkNote, not a court order to us. The file is public and permanent. That is the promise, and it is why we ask you to confirm it, in your own words, before a note is sealed. Please write with that in mind.
We can’t promise any one website or company lasts forever. That is exactly why a note is stored outside of us. What we guarantee is simpler and checkable: the file is in the public archive, and it can be recovered and verified by anyone holding the transaction ID.