ARTICLE 3 - PAGE 9 | BLOCKCHAIN INDUSTRY REVIEW
Sebastiaan van der Lans In a Trusted World Sebastiaan van der Lans is CEO and founder of WordProof By Jilian Godsil
In June 2020, WordProof and Sebastiaan van der Lans were awarded the top prize of Blockchain for Social Good by the European Commission and with it a whopping €1 million. They beat off 175 contenders from more than 40 countries at various rounds to emerge the overall winner with a voting score of 29.5 out of 30 by the voting jury. So what is the WordProof project and why did it win? Sebastiaan starts by explaining that the internet as we know it now is broken. He maintains there is a deep-rooted issue with its trustworthiness. Currently 29% of Europeans are suspicious of the internet with 86% of Europeans saying they have fallen for fake news online. “Here at WordProof.io we want to bring back trustworthiness so that what I read is real and I can verify who wrote it. And then in the example of an ecommerce dispute, how can we retrace the steps? Well, our solution was to leverage blockchain timestamps so we can return to a trusted web – for everyone.” WordProof timestamps content on the blockchain which is helpful for viewers but also for search engines. If changes are made after the original posting, then these are highlighted too. Perhaps the revisions are helpful like a rolling news item, but sometimes they might be unhelpful. To give a real example, we could look at recent UK political fallout in April during their lockdown. The US chief advisor to the prime minister, Dominic Cummins, made headlines beyond his breaking of the lockdown when changes were spotted on his blog from the previous year to appear to make him more expert if not actually prescient on the issue of the coronavirus.
According to the Guardian newspaper, a data scientist spotted the new edits using periodic snapshots of Cumming’s blog saved by the Internet Archive. But these changes were only spotted as a result of intense scrutiny of his movements during the political furore. Otherwise, the insertion might not have been spotted and the advisor might be able to claim he was much more knowledgeable than he actually was.
WordProof does this automatically to all Wordpress websites when installed. Given that some 38% of all websites are based on Wordpress this has the capacity to radically update the content served online.
