What Permafrost is, and is not

Permafrost is storage that can prove itself. Your application talks to it through the S3 API it already knows; every object your users store is encrypted at rest, isolated under a tenant that is theirs, certified on Walrus, and acknowledged by a receipt on Sui that anyone can resolve without an account here — including yours.

This page says what the hosted testnet instance does today. Each property links to the guide that exercises it, and every guide carries the run that proved it on this instance.

What it is

A tenant per user, theirs alone. A tenant is a Sui address. If your users already have one, your issuer’s signed token is the whole credential: no API key is minted, shown once, or mailed, and a tenant appears on first use. Another user holding a perfectly valid credential is refused on read, list, write and delete, and the storage layer records every refusal in its own log. → Bring your own issuer, Tenancy

An S3 endpoint. Bucket, PUT, GET, HEAD, DELETE, list, multipart. Large media goes up in parts and reads back whole or by byte range. → Store, read back, and know when it is certified, Upload media in parts

Receipts on Sui. An ordinary upload mints a manifest receipt: content fingerprint, version lineage, the address that minted it — on this instance, the operator’s. Hash the bytes, resolve the receipt on any Sui fullnode; the match is what says the content is yours. → Read your receipt on Sui, A storage receipt is not a provenance receipt

Verify without us. One route answers with no credential at all: does Permafrost hold provenance for this hash. → Verify a file by hash

Held, not just served. A custody surface for material your app holds on a user’s behalf: store it, ask its status, serve it while its key lives, and delete it by destroying the key — auditable vendor-side deletion, with a certificate on Sui. → Hold, serve, incinerate, Deletion by key destruction

Encrypted at rest, always. Server-side, per tenant, on by default; storing plaintext takes an explicit header. → Encryption at rest

Leases that are watched. Storage on Walrus is leased, not eternal. The instance records every object’s lease and renews before it lapses, so nothing expires silently. → Leases, renewal, and nothing expiring silently

A way out. The receipt on Sui carries the fingerprint, the lineage and the locator of a manifest that lists every key, blob id and content fingerprint you stored — a blob any public Walrus aggregator serves. None of it sits only in our database. → What survives Permafrost, and what does not

Reads that feel fast. That is the whole performance claim on this site.

What it is not

Permafrost is not a model, a memory compiler, a retrieval index, a notebook, or a message relay. It sits beside those things and holds their bytes. Nothing in your application needs to depend on Permafrost specifics: the integration surface is a storage endpoint and a credential, behind whatever storage interface you already have.

It is not a production service. This is a testnet instance, on Sui testnet and Walrus testnet, run by one operator, stopped between evaluation windows. → The testnet instance

It does not promise that bytes stay retrievable without end. It promises that the receipt resolves on Sui regardless of us, and that leases are renewed while the instance runs. The difference is the subject of A storage receipt is not a provenance receipt.

Where to go next

• The testnet instance — what runs, what is proven, what is not, and when it is up.
• Quickstart — a byte-equal round trip in a handful of commands.
• Planned: attested key release — the one piece that is designed and not built.