Here’s a fragment from the Q&A in Europe’s ‘Blockchains for Social Good’ Finalist’s Day. Frank van Dalen, a partner in WordProof, answers a question on WordProof’s business model and the road to adoption. This post transcribes his answer, including links to relevant sources.
How do your business models allow you to build technology so that we can all feel safe?
WordProof’s business model is pretty straight forward. You can do it open source, and you can do a SaaS solution, then it does have lots of features to it. There is a free plan and there’s a paid plan, but the question is why would people actually do it?
Educating the Community
And we need to do a lot of education as a community. There’s one of the reasons why we actually had a legal expert writing a big article, a scientific article about the value of timestamps within the courtroom and that was published in the leading Dutch legal magazine. It’s just been translated to spread it throughout Europe because we have to educate.
Protect Fast and Fluid Content in Online Environments
Secondly, we talked with a really big media developing companies and what they said to us is: “We have [television formats], brands, for which we can hire a whole team of lawyers and notaries to protect our brand. But we are more and more moving towards the online environment. And this is cheap and very fluid content, but we still want to protect it and we cannot have a whole legal team. Let alone that those people are making this content and not willing to write down the concept”.
This is where they recognize the timestamping comes in [as timestamping is an affordable and open solution to achieve protection].
Solve potential Duplicated Content problems upfront
Thirdly, we have a lot of publishers who say like, “We make really great content, but sometimes even with our consent stuff was published on another, media, which is bigger”.
Guess what, Google thinks that they created it. So they are now knocking on our doors like, can you help us? And actually small matters again.
See Case-Study: How indebuurt uses WordProof Timestamp to claim ownership of their content.
WordProof shows Real-life Scalability
It’s those kinds of concepts that are driving scalability. And when it comes to the technical part of scalability, last year we did a real-life test. Can we do 100,000 timestamps within a couple of hours without systems collapsing?
We did not do it in our test environment but we went to a real media publisher and they were like, “you’re not going to ruin our system, are you? Are our readers going to notice?”. We promised them no they won’t, and they didn’t. We timestamped more than 100.000 pieces of content to show it is possible in a real-life environment.
So yeah, let’s see where we are in two years from now.
Relevant links:
- WordProof’s 3-minute pitch at Europe’s ‘Blockchains for Social Good’ Finalist’s Day.
- Q&A: Why would Tech Giants Adopt WordProof’s Timestamp Ecosystem?
- WordProof’s Timestamp Ecosystem