GoKawiilProject Timestamper seals 339 billion Common Crawl web snapshots to Bitcoin blockchain
Project Timestamper has cryptographically timestamped the entire Common Crawl archive, covering 339 billion web page snapshots gathered over 18 years and totaling more than 10 petabytes. Using existing hash blocks of up to 3,000 index entries provided by Common Crawl, the team hashed roughly 134 million blocks and committed them via the OpenTimestamps service to the Bitcoin blockchain as of September 26, 2026.
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By anchoring the archive's hashes to Bitcoin's blockchain, the project creates a verifiable proof that each snapshot existed unaltered at a specific date, which could help distinguish authentic historical web records from AI-generated fakes or tampered data going forward. This kind of timestamping may become increasingly valuable as generative AI makes it harder to tell original content from convincing imitations or confabulations.
- 339 billion Common Crawl web snapshots, spanning 18 years and 10+ petabytes, have been timestamped.
- The process relied on Common Crawl's pre-existing hash blocks and the OpenTimestamps service to timestamp via Bitcoin's blockchain efficiently.
- Any alteration to the archived snapshots after September 26, 2026 would now be cryptographically detectable.
Source: projecttimestamper.org, 2026-10-09
Published there as: “Timestamping a Giant Record of the Web”
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