Trust and safety

Why Powstik exists

The best courses in the world are free to watch and read. Powstik puts them in the right order, so you can learn a whole subject. Every step ends in something you make. Someone who saw it confirms it, and it goes in your Trophy Case.

Powstik was started by Vamsee Kiran. He trained as a physician at CMC Vellore, earned an MBA at St. Gallen and an M.Tech in biomedical informatics, and has built and sold five companies. Powstik is run by Powstik Innovations Private Limited in Bengaluru, India, and is part of the Lean Rocket Lab Fall 2026 cohort in Michigan.

Our master plan

The end: a world where what you actually did counts more than what you say. 10 million people whose work speaks for itself.

1. 1. Make proof real. People who saw your work confirm it, sealed so anyone can check.

   Shipped

2. 2. Make it worth showing. Trophy Cases you can share anywhere.

   Shipped

3. 3. Make it a game worth playing. The Proof-of-Work contest, every two months.

   Live

4. 4. Bring it to schools. IB CAS and the Interschool Capability League.

   Live: Founding Schools
5. 5

   5. Make learning lead to proof. Full Varsity curricula from the world's best free courses.

   Started: Computer Science

6. 6. Help builders prove traction. The Powstik Incubator.

   New
7. 7

   7. Let work open doors. Employers and admissions teams choosing people by verified work.

   Next

How verification works

You do something real, then add proof: a link, a photo, a file or a short write-up.

How much checking a step needs depends on the work. Each step on Powstik says which of these four applies, in one plain line, before you start:

• Checked automatically. For things a machine can read from the official source, like a rating on a chess or coding site. No one else has to sign off, but only if the account is shown to be yours.
• Checked automatically first, then one person. For code, a live site or a shared document. A machine checks it exists, is yours and has a real history. Then one person who knows the work confirms it is good.
• Confirmed by people who saw it. For work a machine cannot see: a performance, a service project, a training session. One named supervisor in a school or company, or two different people.
• Checked, then three people, including a blind review. For capstones and Honors.

Two rules never change. A machine check only counts when you have shown the thing is yours (you sign in with GitHub, add a code to your profile or your site, or pick a document you own). And one person can never count twice, and nobody can confirm their own work. The people are real, signed in with their own account or named by their school or company.

Every confirmation gets a Proof Seal. A seal is a digital signature. It records who confirmed, how they signed in, what proof they looked at and when. If anyone changes the record later, the seal no longer matches.

Our public signing keys are at /.well-known/powstik-signing-keys.json. Anyone can use them to check that a seal was made by Powstik and has not been changed.

Every seal has a public inspector at /v/<seal id>, with a button that re-checks it in your own browser. All seals are also entered into a public log whose latest signed head is at /api/v1/log/sth, so a seal cannot be quietly removed or rewritten later.

How we catch copied work

• You can never confirm your own work.
• How many people must confirm a milestone depends on how it can be checked: none when a machine reads an official source and the work is bound to you, one person after a machine check, one named supervisor or two people for work only people can see, and three for capstones and Honors. One person confirming twice counts once.
• A badge needs every milestone in the outcome to pass its own check. If a confirmation is taken back, the badge shows that.
• Each person can send up to 20 verifier invites and make up to 60 confirmations a day. We also limit how many new accounts can be made from one network in an hour (40).
• Our system flags patterns worth a second look, such as two people confirming each other, many confirmations in one day, or an account that changes its name between confirmations. A person, not a machine, then reviews them. Nobody is removed automatically.
• While a flag is open, that person is kept off the contest boards.
• If a confirmation turns out to be wrong, our team can take it back. We keep a record of who did it and why.

AI-assisted review

When you link a public GitHub repository you have connected to your account, Powstik can review it. This is an AI-assisted review inside EDGE pass/fail gates. It is feedback for you, not verification: it never confirms a milestone, and it never counts as one of the people who confirm your work.

• Before any AI sees anything, fixed checks run. The review stops if the repository is not yours, is a fork with no changes, contains a secret key, or contains text that tries to instruct the reviewer. If most of the history arrived in one day, a person looks at it instead.
• Only public repository content is sent: the README, the file list, up to 8 source files and recent commit messages. Email addresses and phone numbers are removed first.
• The AI gives three scores from 0 to 100: originality, architectural complexity and recovery from failure. Each score must quote your repository exactly. If any quote is not really there, the AI scores are thrown away and replaced by fixed formulas over your commit history, and the review is marked as such.
• No AI ever receives the work of anyone under 18, or of anyone whose age we do not know.
• You see your review. The person you ask to confirm your work sees it next to the work. Nobody else sees it unless you are an adult and choose to show it. Employers can never filter by it.

Who can verify

• Every verifier signs in with Google, GitHub or LinkedIn. No anonymous confirmations.
• If you invite someone to check your work, they can confirm it as soon as they sign in.
• Someone you did not invite can confirm only if they are 18 or over, their account is at least 7 days old, and they have checked a work or school email (we send a code to it; personal addresses don't count). New accounts can do this at most 3 times a day, and no one can confirm more than 3 people at the same organisation in a week this way.
• Each confirmation shows how the verifier signed in and, if they checked one, their work or school domain. Any job title they give is marked as self-described. We read nothing from LinkedIn beyond what sign-in returns.
• Some outcomes involve working with children or other people who need care. For those, only verifiers the person invited can confirm, and each must add a link that shows their professional role, such as a teaching registration. The verifier gives us this link. We do not check it ourselves.

Children and privacy

• We ask for your birth year once. You can skip it.
• Only accounts we know belong to adults (18+) are public. If you are under 18, or have not told us your age, your profile and proofs are seen only by you and people you approve. You never appear in search, suggestions, feeds or leaderboards.
• Under 13: posting, replying and following are off.
• 13 to 17: anyone who wants to follow you needs your approval first.
• Share buttons and "Add to LinkedIn" are not shown on accounts under 18. Links we make never include a minor's name.
• People under 18 never receive hardware prizes.
• When a school uses Powstik, the school confirms it has consent before students join.

We follow the ideas in India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act: we collect only what we need to run Powstik, we never sell your data, and you can download or delete your data at any time. Read our Privacy Policy for the details.

What we never do

• No ads. We do not show ads and we do not sell your data to advertisers.
• No public follower counts. Only you can see who follows you. Your profile shows what you have done, not how popular you are.
• No infinite scroll. Lists load more only when you press a button. Your feed has an end.

Questions or a concern about a proof? Contact us. You can also report any proof with the Report button on it.

Follow the build

We share what we ship, as we ship it.