C2PA is the industry standard for image provenance. It has 5,000+ member organizations and camera hardware support. It also fails completely the moment you post to Instagram. Here's the side-by-side.
Eight criteria that matter for real-world image provenance. Not lab conditions. The actual internet.
| Capability | 🟣 Provyn (pHash) | C2PA (Metadata) |
|---|---|---|
|
Survives metadata stripping
Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, Facebook all strip metadata on upload
|
Yes | No |
|
Works after social media upload
Verification holds after platform reprocessing
|
Yes | No |
|
Works retroactively on existing images
Register photos taken before the protocol existed
|
Yes | No |
|
Survives cropping & compression
JPEG re-encoding, resizing, screenshot of original
|
Yes | No |
|
Requires hardware or camera support
Needs specific cameras, phones, or capture devices
|
No | Yes |
|
Chain of custody pre-publication
Cryptographic record from camera sensor to distribution
|
No | Yes |
|
Industry adoption
Membership, integrations, and platform support
|
Early | 5,000+ members |
|
Open standard
Publicly documented, no vendor lock-in
|
Yes | Yes |
Provyn creates a perceptual fingerprint based on what an image looks like, not its file bytes. That fingerprint survives every platform transformation — resize, compression, metadata stripping, screenshot. Register once, verify anywhere.
C2PA embeds cryptographic signatures into the image file itself, recording the full chain from capture to edit to publish. Rigorous provenance — but entirely dependent on platforms preserving what they reliably strip.
This isn't "Provyn beats C2PA." It's "they solve different halves of the same problem."
C2PA is excellent at what it does: creating a cryptographic chain of custody from the moment of capture. If you're a news organization wanting to verify that a photo came from a specific camera and wasn't edited — C2PA is purpose-built for that. The standard is serious, well-designed, and has real institutional backing.
The problem is the gap between "created" and "published." The moment an image is posted to Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, all C2PA metadata is stripped. Silently. Irreversibly. By design. The very platforms where most image attribution disputes happen are exactly the platforms where C2PA provides zero protection.
Provyn covers that gap. pHash-based verification works on the distributed, re-encoded, metadata-stripped version of an image that actually circulates on the internet. It answers the question C2PA can't: "Is this image — the one I found on Twitter — actually derived from the original I registered?"
Post-publication verification. Proving ownership of images already circulating on social media. Retroactive registration of your back catalog. Finding where your images have been used without permission.
Pre-publication chain of custody. Newsroom workflows from camera to CMS. Provenance for licensed image archives. Any context where you control the distribution channel and platforms preserve metadata.
Want the full technical breakdown? Read: The C2PA Blind Spot →
Upload any photo and watch the perceptual fingerprint survive what C2PA can't. Your images never leave your browser.
Or join the waitlist for early access to Provyn.
Free early access. No spam.