U.S. Department of Commerce uses 9 blockchains to timestamp and verify GDP document, data

In August 2025, the BEA published the 2025 Quarter 2 Gross Domestic Product report as a .pdf.

On August 28, 2025, the Department of Commerce posted the hash of the .pdf to 9 blockchains.

A hash is like a unique fingerprint for a digital file (which is a sequence of bits).

Like a fingerprint, a hash is often used for identification; in this case, the veracity of a file.

The U.S. Department of Commerce press release is here.

The sha 256 hash of the .pdf document is

c70972a12908b73c2407d9cc6842ba2a02203a690f3090cd29f30c45f0cfd93d

I took a look at the data in a Livebook. The source code repository is here: https://github.com/afomi/commerce-blockchain-hash.

You can see how the transactions look on different chains:

• btc
• eth
• sol
• stellar
• tron (I'm not getting a successful response from on API - TODO: follow up here)

While technically, this isn't too impressive, I do think it is a notable signal regarding the usage of blockchains to increase veracity of data.

Publishing verifying metadata for datasets has been tried in various forms, and I'm glad to see this approach.

It's not perfect. It could be more usable, user-friendly for the non-technical person -- always room for improvement. But there are real technical concepts that must be understood and can't be oversimplified.

Publishing these hashes generates awareness of how blockchains can be put to use – and provide utility related to the veracity of information.

Overall, this is another effort toward data veracity, and I'm glad to see it.