Project Timestamper has cryptographically timestamped the entire Common Crawl archive of web page snapshots - 339 billion captures spanning 18 years and more than 10 petabytes of data - by committing hashes to the Bitcoin blockchain. The timestamping proves each captured page existed byte-for-byte in the collection as of 2026-09-26 and makes any later alteration detectable, addressing risks from database tampering and AI-generated forgeries. The attestation was done via OpenTimestamps and anchored to a specific Bitcoin block, providing long-term, public evidence of existence and integrity.
Rather than hashing every capture individually, Common Crawl’s precomputed hashes were grouped into blocks of up to 3,000 index entries, yielding about 134 million blocks. Those block hashes were processed in a few weeks and timestamped in a single batch; verification of any individual snapshot now takes only a few seconds and a few hundred kilobytes of downloaded data. A command-line verification tool demonstrates a quick success response that names the crawl, CDX block, Bitcoin block, timestamp, and matching WARC payload SHA-1. Project Timestamper intends to continue timestamping new Common Crawl data going forward.
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