Sovereign 8K Video Provenance Chain Across Upscale and Interpolation.

Continuous cryptographic chain across generation, super-resolution, frame interpolation, and encoding.

A method and system for maintaining a continuous cryptographic provenance chain across the stages of a multi-stage generative video pipeline. At each stage the system computes a per-frame cryptographic hash, arranges the hashes as leaves of a Merkle tree, signs the root under a post-quantum module-lattice key held in operator-controlled hardware, and emits a stage manifest that hash-links to the preceding stage and records the deterministic stage transform. A verifier given the final encoded bitstream, the chain of stage manifests, and the operator's public key can walk every output frame back through the interpolation stage, the upscaling stage, and the generation stage to the originating prompt and reasoning trace, and can localise any tampering to the specific stage and frame at which it was introduced. Filed 21 May 2026 as GB2611885.1.