May 20, 2026 · 7 min read
What a Songprint Actually Proves
Hashes, timestamps, and a careful list of the things this does not do.
Songprint is the one feature in Coroas that touches a blockchain, and it is the one most easily oversold. So here is the whole mechanism in plain English, followed by an honest list of what it does not do.
The mechanism
One. You choose a version of your song. Not the song in general — one specific version, at one specific moment.
Two. Your browser builds a canonical representation of it: the title, the version number, the heartline, and the section labels and lines, with whitespace normalised and the fields written in a fixed order. Fixed order matters enormously. If the same content could be written two different ways, it would produce two different fingerprints, and the whole thing would be useless.
Three. That text is run through SHA-256. Out comes 64 hexadecimal characters.
Four. Those 64 characters are written to Solana inside a memo, prefixed so it can be recognised later:
COROAS:SONGPRINT:v1:91d2c47a…8fc1
Five. The network records that transaction, and the time it was recorded, permanently and publicly.
What a hash is, if you have not met one
A hash function takes any input and produces a fixed-length output. Three properties make it useful here.
It is deterministic: the same input always gives the same output, on any computer, forever. It is sensitive: change one character — one comma, one capital letter — and the output is completely different, not slightly different. And it is one-way: given the 64 characters, there is no practical way to work backwards to the song.
That last property is why this is safe to publish. The hash of your lyrics reveals nothing about your lyrics. It is only meaningful to somebody who already has the song and wants to check it.
What is actually onchain
Only the hash. Not the lyrics, not the story you started from, not the recording, not the title, not your name.
If you included an audio file, the file itself is hashed on your device and only that hash is folded into the fingerprint. The audio never leaves your machine for this purpose.
What it proves
Exactly one thing, and it is worth stating precisely:
On this date and time, somebody submitted this fingerprint to a public network, and this fingerprint corresponds to this exact version of this song.
If you later produce the version and it hashes to the same value, you have shown that the version existed no later than that timestamp. That is a genuine and sometimes valuable fact. Priority disputes are usually arguments about when, and this answers when without requiring anyone to trust you, us, or a server.
What it does not prove
It is not copyright. In most jurisdictions copyright arises automatically on fixation and is not created by registration — and where formal registration exists, this is not it. A Songprint is not filed with any copyright office and confers no statutory benefits.
It does not prove authorship. It proves a fingerprint was submitted, not that the submitter wrote the song. Anyone holding a copy of your song could hash it.
It does not prove originality. The network does not know whether your song resembles another one. Nothing here checks that.
It does not prove you had it first — only that you had it by then. If someone else wrote something similar earlier and never timestamped it, your Songprint says nothing about them.
It is not a legal determination of anything. It is evidence, of one narrow fact, that a person might find useful. If a real dispute arises, talk to a lawyer.
Verifying one
Verification does not require us. Take the version, canonicalise it the same way, hash it, and compare against what the memo says. If the two match, the version is unchanged since the timestamp. If they do not, something was edited — which is also useful to know.
The verification page in Coroas does this in your browser and shows the recomputed hash next to the published one. We are not a party to the check.
Why bother
Because songs move. You send a draft to a co-writer, you play it at a round, you post a phone video and take it down. Most of the time none of that matters. Occasionally it does, and the question becomes when a particular version existed — a question that is very hard to answer afterwards and very easy to answer beforehand.
That is the entire pitch. It is small, and it is real, and we would rather describe it accurately than dress it up.
Start a song