NEM Ventures makes investment in timestamping solution to protect IP

SharpShark is a blockchain-powered timestamping service that helps protect copyrights and enables the transfer of intellectual property. The company was founded in 2018 by Sasha Ivanova, designed by Valeriia Panina, and developed by Gilbert Gonzalez. Ivanova is currently the CEO, Panina is the Product Designer, and Gonzalez is now the former CTO for the startup.

Ivanova is an IT-engineer by education who enrolled in an online remote school for editors in 2017 where she got into tech writing. Since then she has gone from a blockchain startup writer to business development and product management.

Panina holds a BA in linguistics and she previously studied at and managed a school for editors and designers, where she met Ivanova. Panina started working in the crypto industry during 2017, when she worked as a content designer at a fintech media outlet before working as a managing editor at an analytical agency.

Gonzalez acquired fintech experience in Venezuela and has worked with Goldman Sachs. He developed a payment system for Goldman Sachs and later became interested in blockchain and tokenization.

Ivanova came up with the core idea behind SharpShark idea in December 2018, which was to expand and transfer a conventional timestamping method onto the Blockchain. Panina helped to visualize it and Gonzalez developed it.

The platform is built using the NEM Symbol protocol, which attracted the attention of NEM Ventures. NEM Ventures looks for strategic investments in projects which align with the ethos of the NEM community. The firm focuses on projects which demonstrate a differentiated product, the ability to generate positive net income in the medium term, and founders who showcase the desire to move the blockchain ecosystem forward.

NEM Ventures portfolio includes; Cyclebit, a crypto exchange; IODLT, an IoT and Blockchain platform; Ample, a company that helps communities to reduce their environmental impact, and a range of others.

According to the NEM Ventures press release, SharpShark’s mission is to detect plagiarism, eliminate copyright infringement, and give makers full control over their creations. “Ultimately, the solution creates a fair and equitable decentralized solution for protecting intellectual property,” states NEM Ventures.

According to the company, the platform gives academics the ability to eliminate academic misconduct and establish a priority of findings. Creatives such as photographers, artists, and designers can utilize SharpShark to prove authorship and effectively track their creations in one consolidated space.

“Existing timestamping solutions have fallen short and copyright deposits are extremely costly. SharpShark’s digital timestamping service records artwork, aiming to protect creators’ moral rights to their work by detecting plagiarism and copyright infringement.,” stated Kailin O’Donnell, Co-Founder and General Partner at NEM Ventures. “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.”

SharpShark publishes the digital signature of the text and images to NEMs Symbol blockchain alongside the author details to prove authorship in compliance with GDPR policy. Symbol is a protocol upgrade of NEM’s enterprise blockchain which is due to launch later this year.

The data published on Symbol is then stored in an immutable form on the Interplanetary File System (IFPS), which is a distributed decentralized database. According to Ivanova, storing the content both in Symbol Blockchain and IPFS allows the platform to have proof of form, proof of time stamp, and proof of immutability.

“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,” commented Ivanova. “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.”

To date, SharpShark has tested its solution with the journalists’ union Cispen, and the project is currently participating in the Start-Up Chile Seed acceleration program. Start-Up Chile is a public startup accelerator created by the Chilean Government for high-potential entrepreneurs to bootstrap their startups and use Chile as a foundation.

Start-Up Chile is the leading accelerator in Latin America and is among the Top 10 accelerators globally. The Seed Acceleration program is a six-month program for companies with a functional product and early validation. The accelerator funds up to 50,000,000 Chilean Peso, which is current ~US$80,000.