The Starling Lab is an academic research lab innovating with the latest cryptographic methods and decentralized web protocols to meet the technical and ethical challenges of establishing trust in our most sensitive digital records. Starling uses open-source tools, best practices, and case studies to securely capture, store and verify digital content. With applications across news media, historical preservation and legal accountability, the potential use cases for the Starling Framework are numerous.

As Web3 takes root, we have a unique opportunity to allow the stewards of our most sensitive records to define the next generation of internet protocols and applications. New technologies such as blockchains, NFTs, DAOs, and cryptographic proofs offer a dizzying array of innovations that hold the promise and peril to transform the way we establish the provenance and integrity of information. To cut through the buzz and hype, we’ve built a collaborative and impact-oriented lab that brings academics, expert practitioners, and industry affiliates together to research how these technologies function in the real world. Our work is grounded in a new framework that provides both experts and novices an intuitive and comprehensive guide to their investigations:

CAPTURE Starling prototypes mobile apps and camera firmware to authenticate digital content and metadata at the point of capture. STORE Starling researches how advanced cryptography and decentralized networks can securely distribute and govern content over time. VERIFY Starling experiments with immutable ledgers to register digital content, enabling experts to audit, or verify, the provenance and authenticity of that content.