In a context where police brutality, legal injustice, and institutional mistrust remain pressing issues, innovative uses of blockchain are emerging as tools for civic protection. The PADI Protocol, developed in Nigeria, harnesses decentralized technology to safeguard digital identity, preserve immutable evidence, and connect citizens with legal support
The evolving discourse around blockchain technology increasingly reveals its potential far beyond the confines of cryptocurrency and speculative finance. While public attention has often fixated on Bitcoin trading, decentralized finance (DeFi), and token markets, innovators across Africa are redirecting blockchain’s capabilities toward addressing deeply entrenched social challenges. One such initiative is the PADI Protocol, a Nigerian-born project spearheaded by blockchain engineer Daniel Tambee, which integrates blockchain’s immutable and decentralized nature into a platform designed to prevent wrongful arrests and empower citizens with legal and digital identity tools.
At its core, the PADI Protocol represents a technological infrastructure that serves multiple civic and legal functions: it allows citizens to digitally authenticate their identity through blockchain-verified NFTs, facilitates rapid access to legal representation, and most crucially, enables users to capture and store unalterable photo and video evidence of incidents, particularly those involving law enforcement. Each of these functions is underpinned by decentralized technologies—primarily blockchain and IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)—ensuring that once data is submitted, it remains tamper-proof, transparent, and globally accessible.
The motivation for building the PADI Protocol was born out of the 2020 EndSARS movement, a mass protest against police brutality, particularly by the now-disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in Nigeria. While the movement drew international attention, it also highlighted significant issues around state denial, data manipulation, and the suppression of digital evidence. A particularly notable case was that of activist DJ Switch (Obianuju Catherine), who live-streamed the Lekki Toll Gate shooting, only to face allegations from Nigerian authorities that the footage had been fabricated. Such claims underscored a critical gap: the need for a mechanism to verify and protect citizen-captured media in a way that governments and institutions cannot credibly dispute or erase.
This is where blockchain becomes not merely a data tool, but a sociopolitical safeguard. Blockchain operates on the principle of distributed consensus, meaning that once a piece of data is recorded on the network and validated by its nodes, it becomes effectively immutable. Altering any past data entry would require a majority consensus across the entire decentralized system—a feat that is computationally infeasible and economically impractical. This feature alone makes blockchain an ideal solution for storing evidence, particularly in societies where institutional mistrust, state censorship, and judicial opacity prevail.
The PADI app integrates this core principle by functioning like a traditional camera app—with a critical difference. When users record video or capture images through the app, these media files are instantly uploaded to the blockchain via IPFS, bypassing centralized servers entirely. IPFS is a peer-to-peer protocol that breaks data into small chunks, distributes it across nodes, and references it using cryptographic hashes known as CIDs (Content Identifiers). This ensures that files are retrievable by their content, not their storage location, making them resilient to takedowns and ensuring verifiability. If even a single byte of the content is altered, the CID changes, revealing tampering immediately.
Tambee stresses that this system addresses a key vulnerability with traditional cloud storage platforms such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. These services are subject to centralized control, government takedown requests, and retroactive deletions—as evidenced by TikTok’s compliance with Nigerian government requests to remove content between June and December 2024. In contrast, once content is uploaded to IPFS through PADI, even the platform’s creators cannot delete, edit, or suppress it.
Additionally, the protocol offers a feature Tambee refers to as a “proof engine.” This backend mechanism tags all uploaded content with metadata including timestamps, geolocation (when enabled), and blockchain transaction IDs, effectively creating a cryptographically anchored chain of custody. Such information is crucial not only in the court of public opinion but in legal proceedings where chain-of-evidence integrity is required. This means a video captured during a police stop or violent protest cannot be plausibly dismissed as fabricated or out-of-context—it is time-stamped, hash-verified, and globally distributed.
However, PADI goes beyond evidentiary functions. The platform also aims to democratize legal access and digital identity verification. It does this by connecting users with a network of vetted lawyers through an in-app legal services module. In the event of an arrest or civil dispute, users can request assistance and be matched with a legal representative in real time. This is particularly important in regions where access to public defenders is scarce, or where arrests often occur in legal gray zones without due process.
In parallel, PADI transforms user identity documents—such as national ID cards, passports, or driver’s licenses—into Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which are stored securely on the blockchain. While NFTs are widely known in the digital art and collectibles space, their utility as verifiable digital certificates is increasingly being recognized. In PADI’s case, an NFT-backed ID allows users to prove their identity digitally, especially when physical documentation is unavailable or at risk of being confiscated or destroyed. While Nigerian authorities may not yet recognize a blockchain-verified ID in the same way they do physical documents, this feature provides a secondary layer of authentication and security, particularly useful for legal defense or travel documentation.
From a technical architecture standpoint, PADI is built on smart contract infrastructure—likely leveraging Ethereum or a similar blockchain ecosystem that supports decentralized applications (dApps). Smart contracts govern the behavior of NFT minting, evidence submission, and user authentication in a trustless manner, eliminating the need for centralized intermediaries. This is critical in environments where central authority cannot be trusted or is prone to corruption.
Despite its promise, the PADI Protocol is still in its pre-launch phase. Tambee is currently seeking pre-seed funding to develop the platform further, scale its legal partnership network, and carry out user testing in real-world scenarios. He acknowledges that while the platform addresses a critical need for digital civil liberties infrastructure, its commercial viability is still being explored. Current monetization strategies include charging users for NFT minting services and offering access to premium legal services. However, Tambee admits that the platform may need to pivot toward broader enterprise or government partnerships in the future to ensure sustainability.
The emergence of PADI signals a broader trend across Africa and the Global South, where technological innovation is increasingly being tailored toward civic empowerment and systemic accountability. In contexts where state and institutional trust is fragile, technologies like blockchain, IPFS, and NFTs offer not just speculative economic value but tools of resistance, verification, and social resilience.
By embedding these technologies into accessible, mobile-first applications, innovators like Tambee are redefining what digital justice systems can look like—not as top-down governmental projects, but as grassroots, decentralized architectures designed to protect the rights and identities of everyday citizens.
