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- The winner of the IOTA’s Malaysia hackathon in 2025 is coming up with a groundbreaking solution to verify the originality of images amidst the large-scale algorithmic disinformation.
- This solution combines the IOTA blockchain for immutable proof anchoring and others to produce results.
In 2023, a professor at Virginia Tech’s School of Communication, Cayce Myers, raised an alarm on the fast-rising sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated deep fakes, and how it has become increasingly difficult to identify misinformation.
A similar sentiment was echoed by Salima, a popular crypto influencer who pointed out how hundreds of hyperrealistic fake news stories flooded the Internet in just 24 hours following the release of Google Veo 3.
In a post shared three months ago, Salima highlighted that this new era is known as the “algorithmic disinformation at industrial scale”. According to her, this is characterized by manipulated speeches, satirical headlines made to look like real journalism, etc. Interestingly, most of this fake information is believed and shared by many users.
To address this at an early stage, Salima suggested the importance of IOTA identity and how it can enable the verification of the credentials of every content creator. Fascinatingly, this was met with mixed reactions. While some users lauded this idea, a user identified as “Danny” said thousands of solutions for this kind of problem could come up, and “IOTA may disappear into the abyss”.
As noted in our earlier post, a global identity project backed by Open AI CEO Sam Altman, World Network, has collaborated with South America’s Rappi to simplify proving users’ humanness. Reddit is also joining hands with Worldcoin to reduce spam and deep fake accounts, as explained in our last publication.
IOTA Already Up with a Solution
A few months after her earlier post, Salima just disclosed the emergence of the first real-world application that tackles this problem. The app is called YumeProof, and it emerged as the winner of the IOTA Malaysia hackathon in July 2025.
In a short description written on its X page, YumeProof was reported to provide a Proof of real image and proof of real device to verify the originality of images. According to Salima, their solutions make tempering instantly detectable. This app is also reported to combine three main components.
The first is the IOTA blockchain for immutable proof anchoring. The others are the instant cryptographic signing at capture and hardware attestation through the Google Play Integrity API.
Meanwhile, no one currently knows how this app works since its “specifications and papers” have not yet been released. Until then, Salima advises that users make use of LiDAR/ToF sensors in some phones and iPads, Li-Fi light pulses, and others to get closer to identifying the originality of files.
Combine provenance, rich metadata, physics, and AI, and you can get security levels high enough that faking becomes impractical… the cost, time, and skill needed wouldn’t be worth it.
In a recent update, we covered the launch of IOTA Identity v1.6 and how it addresses the problem of trust in digital data. As indicated in our earlier discussion, IOTA identity is already powering ObjectID.io to provide verifiable digital product authenticity.
