nanalLabs Blog

What is nanalStamp? — automatic sealing, Bitcoin anchoring, tamper-proof records

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

Everyone keeps records. The question is whether those records can serve as evidence. A document with hand-typed dates, or a cloud file with no edit history, has no answer to "how do we know you didn't write this later?" nanalStamp was built to answer that question.

Three sentences of how it works

Write, and it seals. Write in Obsidian and pause; about five minutes later the note's content is automatically sealed as a SHA-256 hash. Every edit stacks a new version — earlier seals are never erased.
At midnight, it anchors to Bitcoin. Each day's seals are batched at your local midnight and committed to the Bitcoin blockchain. Once confirmed in a block, no later modification can be hidden.
Anyone can verify. Certificate PDFs, public verification links that need no login, and offline verification that runs without our server — the recipient doesn't have to trust us to check.

Privacy — only hashes leave your machine

Sealing uses the note's hash (a digital fingerprint). On the free tier, your content is never uploaded. Cloud storage of originals (WORM) is an optional paid feature — and even then, third parties who receive a verification link see only the hash, the time, and the block. Never the text.

Seals cannot be backdated

The principle — and the honest limitation — in one sentence: a record you don't seal today cannot be proven tomorrow. Evidence created after a dispute begins is no longer evidence. Provable history only accumulates forward, from the day you start.

Who uses it

Research labs with notebook obligations, companies preparing prior-use or trade-secret proof, and anyone who wants "I wrote this on that day" to be verifiable. About the service · Start free · 75 free record kits

What Korean regulations actually require of electronic lab notebooks

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

"You should keep a lab notebook" is common advice, but it is surprisingly hard to find out what makes a notebook compliant. This post summarizes the requirements from the primary source — Korea's National R&D Research Note Directive (in Korean). Regulations change, so always check the original text before relying on it.

Why lab notebooks matter

A lab notebook is not a memo — it is legal and administrative evidence. It matters in three situations:

Government-funded R&D — under Korea's National R&D Innovation Act framework, research notes are the baseline evidence of how the work was actually performed. If misconduct is alleged, they decide whether the work was done in good faith.
Patent disputes and prior-use rights — "we were building this first" carries no weight without objective, dated records.
Technology transfer and trade secrets — a record of what was created, when, and by whom is the starting point of both valuation and protection.

The three requirements for electronic notebooks

The directive divides research notes into paper and electronic, and requires electronic notebooks to provide:

Requirement	Meaning
Signature authentication of author and reviewer	Who wrote it, and who checked it, must be electronically verifiable
Automatic recording of entry date and time	Timestamps must be recorded without human hands touching them
Tamper detection	It must be possible to confirm the record was not altered afterwards

All three converge on a single principle: the record must be impossible to fabricate after the fact. A document with hand-typed dates, or a cloud document without an edit trail, cannot satisfy this no matter how diligently it is kept.

The gap for private-sector labs

Korea operates a public timestamp certification service for research notes, but it serves institutions performing national R&D. A corporate research lab that does not take government projects is outside that infrastructure — it must arrange timestamping and tamper detection on its own. The patent office's trade-secret original-proof service registers individual files, but it is manual and per-file — impractical for records that accumulate every day.

A self-check for your lab

Are entry timestamps recorded automatically?
If a record is edited later, does the edit show?
Can the author and reviewer be electronically authenticated?
Can you prove all of the above to a third party — not with your own server's logs, but in an externally verifiable way?

The last item is the hardest. A timestamp on your own server is self-certification, and it is weak in a dispute. The anchor has to live somewhere you cannot touch — a certified document authority, or a public ledger such as a blockchain — before "even we cannot alter it" becomes provable.

Proving "we built it first" — prior-use rights and trade-secret originals

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

A recurring defense in patent disputes is the prior-use right. Article 103 of Korea's Patent Act (non-exclusive license by prior use) grants a party who was already practicing an invention — or preparing to — before someone else filed for it, the right to keep practicing within that scope. The exact text is available (in Korean) at casenote.kr. Most patent systems, including Europe's and the United States', have a comparable doctrine.

The issue is always proof

The hard part is proving "we were already building this." A Korean patent office guide for small businesses (PDF, Korean) lists, citing a 2006 report by the Japan Patent Office, the kinds of evidence that support a prior-use claim: research notebooks, technical reports, drawings and product specifications, plus business records such as plans, estimates, delivery slips, and daily work logs. It also names ways to strengthen that evidence — notarization, and private timestamps and electronic signatures — and stresses that what matters most is to "create and preserve evidentiary records in the course of daily work, in a way that can prove when they were written."

In other words: the claim itself is worth little. What decides the outcome is dated records.

What the original-proof service certifies — and what it doesn't

Trade-secret disputes have the same structure. Korea's original-proof service registers a digital fingerprint (hash) of a file with a certification body; in a dispute it certifies existence, holder, and time of possession. In January 2025, three private organizations were additionally designated as certification bodies.

But an original-proof certificate only certifies "this file existed at this time." To be protected as a trade secret you must separately prove confidentiality management, economic value, and non-disclosure — and a prior-use defense is not granted on a certificate alone. It needs the substance: plans and experimental data, recorded as the work happened.

Where practice breaks down

The original-proof service registers files one at a time. That works for proving a single document, but it cannot realistically keep up with records that accumulate daily — and prior-use evidence is precisely that: an unbroken timeline of day-by-day records, not a single snapshot.

So everything converges on one question: not "can we certify this one document," but "do our daily records survive, in order, with verifiable timestamps, without gaps?"

75 record kits — folder structures and templates, free

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

The most common reason record-keeping never starts isn't the tool — it's the format. What goes in which folder, under which headings? To remove that barrier, nanalStamp publishes record kits for dozens of fields, free.

What's in a kit

One kit is a bundle of folder structure + note templates + an automatic dashboard. A lab-notebook kit, for example, ships the folder tree for experiments, meetings, and ideas, the templates for each, and a dashboard note that aggregates your recording activity.

75 kits, browsable without login

The full catalog is at nanalstamp.com/kits — no login needed — covering lab notebooks, experiment logs, counseling records, site inspections, quality records, and more. Preview each kit's folder tree and template contents, then take what you need. All free.

In teams, kits become the standard

Team admins can designate a kit as the team's standard folder structure and deploy it to every member. Downloaded kits become the team's own — edit or delete freely — and new teams start with four team-structure kits built in. Per-folder rules travel with the kit too: "new notes in this folder use this template, titled prefix-date."

Kits and sealing

Kits are just folders and Markdown — they work without nanalStamp. But place them inside your sealing scope, and every record you keep in them carries a verifiable timestamp — the form itself becomes an evidence format.

Introducing the nanalLabs blog

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

nanalLabs carries the Korean word nanal — "day by day" — in its name. What we want to build is not grand documentation, but records that accumulate daily, and the ability to prove, years later, that each record still reads exactly as it did the day it was written.

Our first product, nanalStamp, automatically seals your Obsidian research notes the moment you save them, anchoring a timestamp into the Bitcoin blockchain so that anyone can verify the record has not been tampered with. It never changes how you write — it only adds evidentiary weight to what you already do.

What this blog will cover

Research-note regulations — electronic lab notebook requirements and what a corporate research lab actually needs to have in place
Records as evidence — proving when something was written: prior-use rights in patent disputes, trade-secret originals, audit responses
The culture of daily records — tools and habits that make record-keeping sustainable
Product news — how nanalStamp is being built, in plain language

If there is a topic or regulation you would like us to cover, let us know. We intend to grow this blog the same way records grow — day by day.

Using nanalStamp as a team — structure flows down, management lives on the web

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

Scaling sealing from one person to an organization raises two problems: every member's folder structure drifts apart, and the admin can't see the state of the records. nanalStamp teams solve both by pushing structure down automatically and pulling management up to the web.

Members — almost nothing to set up

When an admin invites you, an email arrives with a password-setup link. Set a password and you're done — no sign-up, no email verification. Log into the plugin and the team profile arrives automatically; team members get original storage (PRO privileges) without a personal subscription, with originals going to the team's storage.

The sealing scope is already decided: everything under the team's top-level folder, and members cannot un-set it. In exchange, notes outside the team root are never sealed and never counted in team statistics — personal records and privacy are structurally separated.

Admins — everything on the web, no Obsidian required

Admins contract seats on the pricing page, then work in the web team console — dashboard, research projects, task inbox, audits, reports, kits, and settings.

Team name = the top-level folder in every member's vault. Set it once, deploy, and every member gets the same structure.
The standard structure comes from kits. New teams start with four team-structure kits (numbering-based, compliance-based, project-centric, and dev-lab), and the kit store has more — all free, all editable once they're yours.
Per-folder rules assign templates and automatic titles (prefix-date) to new notes in each folder.

Evidence by research project

Records written under a project folder are attributed to that research project. Per-project evidence status, completion reports, per-member activity, and audit-response screens all live in the team console — see the team guide for the full walkthrough.

Proving it — certificates, public links, offline verification, submission packages

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

In the end, records are kept to be shown to someone. nanalStamp has four proof instruments, and all of them start from a note's proof & timeline.

Certificate PDF

"Issue certificate (PDF)" produces a certificate carrying the issue number, SHA-256 hash, sealing time, Bitcoin anchor, issuer signature, and a public verification URL with QR code. Need proof as of a past version? Choose the reference point in the submission package flow.

Public verification link — facts public, content private

A "public verification link" opens without login. The recipient sees the hash, the time, and the block — never the content. Once the anchor is confirmed, the page shows "sealed in Bitcoin block #N · no tampering" with a link to a block explorer.

Verifying without our server — the offline bundle

Choosing "this note only" in the submission package produces a .nanalproof bundle — original, proof, and verification instructions in one. Drop the original and the bundle into np-verify: all computation runs inside your browser and nothing is sent to any server. Change a single character of the original and verification fails with a mismatch — the chain and signatures still pass, which is exactly what proves that only the original changed.

The submission package — one zip for audits and examinations

For bundled submissions — patent examination, project audits — use ribbon → "Create submission package (.zip)": originals, the seal chain, Bitcoin evidence, certificate PDFs, and a verifier program in a single zip.

The core design here is the disposition ledger. Submitted material is a subset of the chain, and silence about what was omitted is indistinguishable from hiding unfavorable records. So the ledger inside the package lists every sequence number in the chain with its disposition — included / superseded / after-cutoff / out-of-scope — and the recipient's verifier computes the "should exist" list from the chain itself, catching even the forgery that deletes a note and its ledger entry together.

Opening past versions, recovering deleted notes — Rewind

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

Seals stack as versions. That is why you can open a past state of any note, roll back to it, and even recover notes you deleted.

Opening a past version

In a note's proof & timeline, click "Local" on any history row. That version's text opens read-only — you look into the past without touching the current note.

Rolling back to a version

"Restore this version" offers two choices — restore as a copy (current note untouched, a copy is created) or restore in place. When in doubt, choose the copy.

Recovering deleted notes — Rewind

Ribbon → "Rewind — find deleted notes" lists only the notes deleted from this vault. Pick a note and a version, and the restored text comes back byte-identical to the original — and is resealed immediately, so the fact that a restore happened is itself on record. Even recovery cannot be done quietly; that is a property of the seal chain.

Rebuilding everything — bulk restore

Changed machines, or lost the vault entirely? Ribbon → "Bulk restore (from nanalStorage)" reconstructs your notes in their original folder structure, attachments included (free twice a year). Afterwards, a reconstruction report records what was restored and what wasn't — notes from your free-tier days whose originals haven't been uploaded yet are listed as "no stored copy." That is honest reporting, not failure.

To browse everything stored in the cloud, use ribbon → "Browse stored notes" — a note browser with vault filters and per-note version history.

Free vs. paid — original storage is the dividing line

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

First, to be clear: sealing, Bitcoin anchoring, and verification all work on the free tier. Paid plans (Lite / Pro / Max) add three things — cloud WORM storage of your originals, certificate PDFs, and public verification links.

Where originals live

On the free tier, originals exist only in the local archive on your device. With a subscription, originals are also stored in cloud WORM storage — write-once storage that cannot be modified or deleted. Capacity is cumulative: Lite 1GB / Pro 10GB / Max 30GB. Sealed originals can never be deleted, so deleting notes does not free space. See pricing (annual plans).

When you subscribe, originals of everything you sealed while on the free tier are backfilled — your pre-subscription history is not left behind.

Attachments are sealed and stored too

Images and PDFs referenced by a note are sealed along with it, regardless of which folder they sit in. If a linked file exceeds your plan's attachment limit, the note itself is held, not sealed — sealing a note while silently dropping its attachment would produce incomplete evidence, so the plugin stops and tells you. Shrink the file under the limit and the note seals automatically on the spot.

When a subscription ends — and when you delete your account

Expiry is quiet: sealing, verification, and the local archive continue; only cloud storage of new originals stops. Originals already stored remain for their retention period.

Account deletion is different. Deleting your account destroys the encryption keys for your stored originals — re-registering with the same email cannot recover them. Download what you need before deleting.

Subscribing from outside Korea

International users pay in USD with local taxes calculated automatically; seller registration and VAT filing are handled by the Merchant of Record. Usage, expiry, and auto-renewal all live on one screen at Account.

Write, and it seals — the five-minute rhythm

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

The basic rhythm of sealing is: write → stop typing → sealed five minutes later. Nothing is sealed mid-keystroke — your writing settles into one version once your hands rest.

The countdown and seq

The moment you save a note inside the sealing scope, the status bar switches to something like "sealing in · 4:56." When time is up it becomes "Sealed · seq N" with no action from you. seq is the sequence number of this seal in your chain.

Edits stack versions

Change even one character of a sealed note and it returns to "sealing in…" The previous seal is not erased — a new version stacks on top. Edit, reseal, repeat: that growing history is how nanalStamp keeps records. See the restore guide for how to open and recover past versions.

When you need to seal right now

Ribbon seal icon → "Seal this note" seals immediately, without the five-minute wait — for moments like right before a submission, when now is what you need on record.

A note's proof and timeline

Click the seal indicator in the status bar, or ribbon → "Proof & timeline for this note," to see the note's full seal history — time, seq, and anchor status per row, with buttons to open each version. Certificates, public verification links, and submission packages all start from this screen.

The ribbon menu is the front door

Click the seal icon to open a grouped menu — tasks / sealing / certificates & sharing / nanalStorage / status / account. Anything that needs attention (held seals, rejections, tasks) shows a red badge with a count; no badge is the normal state.

Getting started — from sign-up to your first seal

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

All you need is an email address and a computer with Obsidian. Everything in this guide is done once — after that, you just write.

1. Create an account

Sign up at nanalstamp.com/join with an email and password. Click the verification link in the email — login is blocked until you do.

2. Install the plugin and log in

In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins and install nanalStamp, then enable it. A seal icon appears in the left ribbon and the status bar shows "🔑 login required." Log in under Settings → nanalStamp — your API key is issued automatically, so there is nothing else to create.

3. Choose folders to seal — the step that matters most

Logging in does not seal anything yet. You decide which folders become records — nothing starts before you choose, and that is by design.

In the modal that appears after login, pick the folders to seal (for example, Lab notes) and apply. Checking a parent folder includes everything under it. Notes outside the scope are never sealed, no matter how much you edit them — your private notes stay private.

4. Where past versions accumulate

In the same modal, confirm the local archive location (default ~/nanalStamp-archive). Every seal stores that moment's full text here as a version. There is no off switch — only a location choice — because preserving originals is the premise of the service. On the free tier this folder is the only place your originals live, and it exists on this device only. Lose the device, lose the originals — cloud storage is covered in the subscription guide.

5. Ready

When the status-bar warning changes to "nanalStamp · 0 sealed," you're set. Log in at nanalstamp.com/home to see the same state on the web. Now, just write.

Bitcoin anchoring — proof that outlives the company

2026-08-14T00:00:00+09:00

nanalStamp has two stages. Sealing chains and signs your note's hash on our server; anchoring fixes that seal into the Bitcoin blockchain. This post is about the second stage.

Why Bitcoin?

The weakness of any timestamp is the question "who vouches for this time?" Your own server's clock is self-certification — weak in a dispute. A timestamp authority (TSA) requires trusting that authority's continued existence and key management. The Bitcoin blockchain is different: block times are vouched for by a globally distributed network rather than any one company — there is no single company to trust, and no single company whose disappearance breaks verification. If nanalStamp shut down tomorrow, the fact that "this hash existed as of this block" would remain independently verifiable by anyone, for as long as Bitcoin exists.

Only hashes go onto the blockchain. Your note's content is never published anywhere.

When does anchoring happen?

Normally you do nothing. Each day's seals are batched at your local midnight and submitted to Bitcoin. Batching a day's worth, rather than submitting every seal individually, keeps costs down and confirmation predictable.

When you need it fixed right now — say, just before a submission — use ribbon → "Anchor to Bitcoin now." Confirmation typically takes a few hours; once confirmed, the status bar shows a block number like "₿#959933." Versions written after confirmation go back to "awaiting anchor" — every version is confirmed separately.

Verification is standards-based

Anchors are built on the open OpenTimestamps-style Merkle commitment scheme, so verification does not require nanalStamp's server. The Bitcoin evidence included in certificates and submission packages can be checked with standard tools. The point of this architecture is not "trust us" — it is "check for yourself."