“The serviceberry asks for nothing. It simply gives — and in giving, calls the whole forest into relationship.”
— inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry
The idea
The serviceberry, is known by many names; Saskatoon, siyaʔ (by the Syilx and Sinixt People), sq̓umu (by the Ktunaxa People), speqpeq7úw'i (by the Secwepemc People). Regardless of its name, this wonderful being doesn't sell its fruit. It offers it freely, and every creature that eats carries its seeds further than they could have gone alone. Serviceberry the project takes that as its model: generosity as infrastructure. Creators give their work to the world; the community gives its computing power to protect it; verifiers give their time to uphold the record. No one extracts, no one owns the network, everyone tends it.
The north star of this project
Any creator, whether a musician, weaver, jeweller, painter, or a potter, can upload a work, sign it, and receive a tamper-proof certificate of authorship that is verifiable in court and witnessed by a community-run network of nodes and LoRaWAN gateways, at no cost to them.
How a work is registered
The processing engine turns any creative file into a signed, legally-defensible registration package:
Perceptual + crypto hash
A pHash/dHash for images, audio spectrograms and textile photos, alongside a SHA-256 of the raw file.
Invisible watermark
A steganographic mark embedding creator ID, timestamp, and an AI opt-out flag. This serves as protection and a statement of values.
C2PA manifest
An industry-standard provenance manifest, signed with the creator's own keypair.
LoRaWAN witness
An ~80-byte radio packet. Local, unforgeable timestamp broadcast to nearby community gateways.
The community chain
Serviceberry runs its own Hyperledger Fabric network on community hardware — no proof-of-work, no mining, no corporate ledger. One Raspberry Pi plays three roles at once: a Fabric peer that syncs with the global network over the internet, an IPFS node that pins watermarked files, and a LoRaWAN packet forwarder that turns local radio timestamps into permanent on-chain records. The internet connection the gateway already needs is what makes the whole network global.
For the creator
All of that stays invisible. The experience is upload, fill, sign. Then email magic-link authorization, a drag-and-drop with a metadata form, a human-readable certificate with a QR code, a dashboard of registered works, and a public page where anyone can paste a hash or drop a file to verify. No blockchain knowledge, no crypto wallet, no fee.
Where it stands
It's an early-stage, part-time build with a clear roadmap: a pip-installable Python processing package and CLI first (serviceberry register <file>), then a Fabric testnet and Pi node image, then the web app, then real community nodes, and finally an alpha with local makers in Nelson, BC. Framed, deliberately, as a gift-economy project, DEFINETLY not a crypto project.
“The serviceberry doesn't keep a ledger of what it gives. But we will — so that what creators give to the world can never be taken from them.”