The real pressure here is on the watermark vendors who have been selling “public verification” while quietly keeping a detector secret, because once you can verify with a 32 byte key the whole trust story gets a lot cleaner. That also makes provenance tooling easier to adopt outside the lab, since you can hand the verifier to lawyers, platforms, and journalists withuot giving them an embedder by accident. It does make the copy attack problem feel more immediate, though, since the public decoder is now part of the ecosystem instead of a guarded oracle. So I’d expect this to push the field toward content binding and policy layers pretty fast, not just better hiding.