NEM Ventures, the venture capital and investment arm of the NEM blockchain ecosystem, has made a strategic investment in SharpShark, a blockchain-powered time-stamping solution that protects creators’ copyrights, while enabling the transfer and tokenisation of intellectual property, and the auto monitoring of violations.Kailin O’Donnell, Co-Founder and General Partner at NEM Ventures, says: “Existing timestamping solutions have fallen short and copyright deposits are extremely costly. SharpShark’s digital time-stamping service records artwork, aiming to protect creators’ moral rights to their work by detecting plagiarism and copyright infringement. We believe that all makers should have full control over their creations, and are aligned with SharpShark’s mission to create a fair and equitable solution for protecting intellectual property.”
Built on Symbol by NEM, SharpShark provides a decentralised solution to protect text and image copyrights – by times-tamping, saving in full, and tokenising intellectual property. SharpShark is designed for creators ranging from writers, academics and journalists to photographers, artists and designers. The solution publishes the digital signature of the text and images to the Symbol blockchain alongside the author details to prove authorship, always according to GDPR policy. The data is then stored in immutable form.
SharpShark has a suite of potential use cases spanning media, academia and user-generated content platforms. Writers and journalists can detect plagiarism, prevent copyright violations and generate a portfolio of their intellectual property. This enables media outlets to monetise content by combining anti-plagiarism detection and time-stamping into one unified solution. Further, academics have the ability to eliminate academic misconduct and establish a priority of findings. Additionally, creatives such as photographers, artists, designers can utilise SharpShark to prove authorship and effectively track their creations in one consolidated space.
SharpShark was founded by Sasha Ivanova, an IT-engineer, award-winning writer and one of CoinTelegraph Latam’s ‘Top-100 Blockchain Entrepreneurs’, and Valeriia Panina, a crypto native content designer and former Managing Editor of an analytical agency. To-date, SharpShark has tested their solution with Cispen, the journalists’ union, and the project is currently participating in the Start-Up Chile Seed acceleration program.
Sasha Ivanova, CEO and Co-Founder of SharpShark, says: “As long-standing members of the blockchain community, we’ve followed the NEM project for years, and the Symbol blockchain suits perfectly for intellectual property management. Symbol has a layered architecture that enables trustlessness, and performance optimisation, which was a natural fit for our solution. We’re excited to work with the NEM Ventures team to further develop our product, with the aim of making copyright and intellectual property protection more accessible and equitable.”
As the venture capital and investments arm of the NEM blockchain ecosystem, NEM Ventures promotes the growth of NEM technology through strategic investment in meaningful, high-tech projects. Symbol, a performant, scalable and feature-rich protocol upgrade of NEM’s enterprise blockchain, is due to launch later this year.
Valeriia Panina, Co-Founder and Product Designer of SharpShark, says: “Unfortunately, current copyright laws are outdated and ineffective. In fact, The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works was passed 134 years ago, with the last alterations made in 1971. Currently, the copyright symbol (©) makes no difference – but it should! Our solution caters to the digital era, at a time when an upgrade to intellectual property laws is paramount.”
