Dr. Dominik Thor sat down with journalists at CoinFest UK 2018 to discuss Vaultitude, his company building blockchain-based intellectual property protection. The platform, which operates under the Vau
Dr. Dominik Thor sat down with journalists at CoinFest UK 2018 to discuss Vaultitude, his company building blockchain-based intellectual property protection. The platform, which operates under the Vaultitude name after rebranding from IPchain Database, fills a void Thor discovered in the market.
His journey to founding Vaultitude began in banking and then extended into biotech. The biotech experience proved educational. Universities, researchers, and inventors all faced the same fundamental challenge: establishing legal proof of creation. Who came up with an idea first? Who made the breakthrough? These questions determine rights and ownership. Yet proving priority in the modern era remains difficult.
Thor searched for existing blockchain solutions to this problem. He found none.
"Even though it's such an obvious use case, if you take a look from a blockchain perspective it's really easy to come up with something like a timestamp, where you can prove you can do something prior to anyone else. That, legally speaking, has been a huge problem in the past for inventors, creators of art, of music, of videos, of text, and researchers. They have to prove that they did it first. That is the basis for their rights. The same applies to web pages."
The absence of any player in this space surprised him. He approached WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations. WIPO wrote the regulations governing patent offices worldwide. Their endorsement of the concept was immediate and firm.
"Blockchain is a huge thing here, we figured everyone has to be aware of that in intellectual property and nobody was," Thor said.
WIPO became more than a validator. Two former WIPO directors joined Vaultitude as advisors, providing what Thor describes as "great help" to the team.
The market opportunity spans several distinct user categories. Large corporations with R&D operations—companies like Google, Siemens, and IBM—represent one segment. These organizations need to document when discoveries occur and who made them. Medium-sized firms form another group. They need IP protection but cannot afford the infrastructure of a major R&D department.
"I think we will have a very broad range of users, obviously companies with their own R&D projects, the Google's, Siemens, IBM's, of the world, but also medium-sized companies that don't have the resources for a huge IP department."
Universities and research institutions serve as additional users. The work of professors and experts requires protection and administration. But the largest potential user base consists of individual creators who generate intellectual property without recognizing it as such.
"Then comes the largest use case group, people like you and me who create IP without even knowing we should protect it, you make photos, you code a web page, you are maybe a game developer, you write music, or text, or blog entries. All this you automatically own the right to, but the problem is you have to prove that it is yours and in the digital world that opportunity is getting smaller, when things can be exchanged so quickly, how can you go back and say actually that is me that is doing that? Thanks to IPchain (Vaultitude) database that will be possible."
Photographers, developers, musicians, and writers all own copyrights to their work. Establishing that ownership in a digital environment where content spreads globally and attribution becomes obscured presents real difficulty.
Vaultitude is building on Ethereum for now. The company chose Ethereum for its security and flexibility. The team designed the architecture to be blockchain-agnostic. No single blockchain is essential to the system.
"We need to have an open architecture because what we are trying to do should be independent of any public blockchain, that means our architecture allows us to run on any architecture that is suitable," Thor explained.
In the future, Vaultitude could shift to another blockchain entirely or allow users to select their preferred platform.
The technical architecture handles a critical problem: data size. Storing text on a blockchain is one thing. Storing 3D designs, large codebases, audio files, or video creates scaling issues that compromise network performance. Vaultitude uses IPFS, the InterPlanetary File System, as the solution. Large files reside on IPFS. The blockchain stores only the cryptographic hash and a link.
"We use IPFS, the InterPlanetary File System, to store the data. It allows us to have something scalable and more or less free of cost, we store the hash on the blockchain and link to the IPFS file."
Users receive both the hash and the IPFS link, which together prove their IP is protected and timestamped. Vaultitude published a demonstration at vaultitude.com showing the process in action. Users can see how a file gets uploaded, its hash gets recorded on Ethereum, and a timestamp emerges. That timestamp serves as the anchor for proving authorship, filing defensive publications, or establishing the existence of contracts and sales agreements.
Patent regulations vary across countries. In many jurisdictions, creators could use Vaultitude to establish priority, then file expensive formal patent applications afterward. The economic difference is significant. Traditional patent prosecution costs money. Vaultitude timestamps do not.
Larger institutions have asked Thor what happens if Vaultitude fails as a company. The question matters because it speaks to data security and longevity.
"Data that is stored on the blockchain stays there forever, I think that is a huge competitive advantage and one of the reasons why blockchain is perfectly tailored for this use case of protecting IP."
The blockchain persists regardless of any single company's fate. The protection does not evaporate if Vaultitude goes out of business.
User interface design received substantial attention. Vaultitude will serve multiple constituencies: creators protecting their work, corporate users managing proprietary information, academic institutions, and patent offices. Patent office employees need to search Vaultitude as a database or access it through a web interface when they evaluate patent applications. The company produced a video guide showing the UI design for version 1.0.
"Our aim is to create a holistic tool for protecting the innovator's interests. Vaultitude is not limited to "only" innovations or research and art, we try to provide better protection to all kinds of files, trade secrets or vital data. We want to ensure safe storage, sharing, sale, licensing, publishing and proving the ownership of files and/or date, all conveniently referred to as IP."
Vaultitude extends beyond simple timestamping. The platform supports non-disclosure agreement management. Users can record when an NDA was signed and document all subsequent sharing of confidential information. The system creates an audit trail proving compliance or breach.
"We can allow people to safely exchange information," Thor said. "You store information on Vaultitude, keeping it in a secure digital vault and then you can do many things with it."
Vaultitude has run pre-sales and private sales targeted at institutional investors. A public token sale is scheduled for the third quarter of 2018. The first beta version will launch at the same time. The company is aware it operates in a market worth billions of dollars and that demand exists for this service. The first release must be solid.
"We are targeting a multi-billion-dollar industry here, where there is actual need for a service such as ours," Thor said.
Major players have approached Vaultitude. They recognize the opportunity but struggled to find partners who could guide them through blockchain implementation. That gap creates an advantage for Thor's team.
"They, just as we did in the beginning, they don't find the real partner that could help them understand and use blockchain to its full effect, thankfully we get a lot of support."
Thor sees intellectual property not as abstract but as the foundation of modern economic value. "IP sounds so very abstract but it's something that all of us create on a daily basis." For corporations, the ideas they own often exceed their tangible assets in market value. Protecting those ideas matters economically and ethically. That conviction drives Vaultitude's mission.
Vaultitude has scheduled appearances at major IP organizations. The company will demonstrate its platform at events hosted by the WTO, WIPO, EUIPO, EPO, IEEE, and LESI. Patent offices, law firms, universities, and high-tech companies are already in conversations with the Vaultitude team about how to deploy the technology. Coverage on CNBC's "Advancements with Ted Danson" will air later in 2018.
