Trust nothing. Verify what is published.
The Reference is built so that no one — including VolRoc — has to be trusted. Every value VolRoc publishes is anchored to a content identity you can recompute yourself, from the bytes VolRoc serves, using standard tools and no VolRoc software.
What verification is for
A Reference Edition is a content-addressed object: its identity is the SHA-256 of its sealed manifest. When VolRoc publishes an Edition, it publishes that identity. Every /reference/v1/ endpoint served here is a deterministic projection of the sealed Edition that identity names.
Verification is the act of independently confirming that what VolRoc serves you is what VolRoc published — by fetching the public bytes and hashing them yourself. It is mechanical, needs no account and no key, and requires nothing from VolRoc but the published identity.
A reference institution shows its checksum, not its opinion. This page is that checksum, made runnable by a stranger.
What you can verify right now
Two identities are published, and everything public is anchored to them: the Edition identity (sha256:67ddb9e5e529217bc04784e489522af12a11dff087dd1afcc97a6f7ee19eb39f, the SHA-256 of the sealed manifest) and the published-tree identity (sha256:e9889ae4…a80, over the governed publication). Fetch any endpoint and hash exactly the bytes you receive.
Each response is a deterministic projection of the sealed Edition. Where a published identity or digest is exposed, it can be independently compared against the bytes received. Fetch the same endpoint twice, from anywhere, with no account and no key: identical bytes. A published content identity allows any later change to be detected independently.
What is not available today, and why
One check is deliberately not available: recomputing the sealed Edition package from its own distributed bytes. That requires the package itself — the manifest and its checksums — and VolRoc has not published it. This is a governance decision, not an omission.
reference-v1.2026.08 is published as distribution_posture: metadata_only with download_available: false. Its identity and every projection of it are public and verifiable as in section 02; the sealed package is held. When the package is designated for distribution, package-level recomputation becomes available and is documented here.What the hash proves — and what it does not
A checksum is a precise instrument. It is important to be equally precise about its limits.
The hash proves
- Identity. This is the specific Edition VolRoc sealed and cited — not a re-encoded or substituted copy.
- Integrity. Not one byte changed in transit or at rest.
- Immutability of citation. A citation to this identity can never silently point at different content later.
The hash does not prove
- Correctness of the world. It certifies what VolRoc recorded, not that every recorded fact was right.
- That nothing was later corrected. Corrections exist; they live in the append-only errata ledger as dated entries, never as silent edits.
- Anything about price or outcome. This Edition carries
settlement_disposition: not_asserted_in_identity_edition; it records identity and resolution criteria, not marks, forecasts, or settlement.
This separation is the institution's honesty: what is certain (the bytes) is cryptographically certain, and what is contestable (the world) is corrected in public, on the record.
Why this design
Content-addressing means a citation cannot rot. Because the Edition is named by the hash of its contents, changing any content necessarily changes the name. A reference to sha256:5e25… in a paper written today resolves to the same bytes in 2046 or fails loudly — it can never quietly become something else. That is the property EDGAR, Crossref and CRSP earned over decades; VolRoc gets it for free from the hash.
Verification is free even where data is paid. The current identifiers, the resolver, the vocabulary, edition identities, errata, methodology, and this verification path are permanently free. Commercial products are built on the historical record — the past, the vintages, the point-in-time bindings — never on the ability to check that a published Edition is what it claims to be.
More on the principles behind that boundary is on the governance page, and how the records are produced is on the methodology page.