At a time when the internet is overrun with misinformation and deep-fakes, it’s more important than ever that we harness tech to capture, verify, and preserve our history. Blockchain, cryptographic systems, and the decentralized web hold the keys to helping us separate truth from fiction and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

The Starling Initiative is an image and video authentication protocol to record, store and share genocide survivor testimonies. Its first project is to secure the Visual History Archive, a collection of 55,000 genocide testimonies from 64 countries and in 42 languages across nine genocides.

Starling forces us to think about how we save and weight information, and how human civilization will preserve a permanent historical record of our darkest history.