We provide a blockchain-powered tool that helps to protect intellectual property (in particular public content), tokenize it, certify it, and monitor copyright violations.
Our mission – Copyright protection should become a commodity! In 2 years 30% of global content will be kept in Blockchain and IPFS and we created infrastructure for that.
Tell us about yourself?
My name is Sasha Ivanova, I am the Founder & CEO of SharpShark. I am an IT-engineer by education. In 2016 I was formed as an editor-in-chief, got into tech writing and soon won a prize for the best article about blockchain. Since then I have gone from blockchain startup writer to biz dev and product manager. Later, Ideated a “blue ocean” of copyright protection.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
One of the most important people in my life, from whom I learnt business, once asked me: “Think what you really want – to make money or transcend?, because making money is easy, but making the world a better place, that’s what is really worthwhile”. This is what I wanted to know two years ago.
What problem does your business solve?
While in SharpShark we were making pilots for clients, copywriting for media outlets, we stumbled upon the need for copyright protection for online sellers, the lack of which was causing multi-billion dollar losses. Europe produces an enormous amount of IP that is copied by countless people across the globe, leading to losses in the billions of dollars.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I believe that intellectual property protection is the second most important use case in the Blockchain industry after cryptocurrencies. The reason is simple – there are not so many things in the world that really require immutability of data, and intellectual property is definitely one of them.
In the contemporary world, there is a remarkable way to get authorship confirmation – faster, easier, and cheaper. And this way is distributed ledgers: blockchain and IPFS. For the first time in history, we can store content in an immutable form digitally. The proofs we create in this form are ideal for use with modern laws EUCD and DMCA.
What is your magic sauce?
SharpShark is the only tool that provides both protection and checks for plagiarism simultaneously and automatically. This is our superpower. All blockchain copyright protection services have a big issue: they don’t check the real authorship of the content by confirming the legitimacy of the initial data. That’s why in other Blockchain apostille services, people were able to store content that was not their actual property. We’ve resolved this problem by implementing anti-plagiarism monitoring.
Until now, the process of dispute resolution in the case of copyright violation was a very slow and painful one. And this poses a real problem because, in the digital media sphere, the largest share of traffic accumulates within the first 3–7 days of the content’s publication. SharpShark is striving to bridge this gap by automatizing the process. This is our main value.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Five years from now, we want to make original content dominant, protect the rights of content creators and free the world of plagiarism.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Code is the kingdom, developer is the king. Keeping high level of motivation constant in developers was the most challenging in our journey.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
As our solution is catered for the press, within a short period of time, people will begin seeing Blockchain+IPFS certificates used by many news outlets around the world. Thanks to this, people will get used to seeing the Blockchain protection sign in every article, creating ideal conditions for the technology to become viral.
Check how this article Blockchain autorships certificate looks like
https://go.sharpshark.io/certificate/73d33e0b-cdf5-4fa6-8c26-a806e510d0fe
