The NKOR project utilizes blockchain technology to help digital content creators authenticate and timestamp their work for secure and profitable distribution.

The advent of Web 2.0 allowed internet users to become independent publishers and creators, and while new developments rewarded content generation, they also brought on new challenges, particularly when it comes to copyright infringement.

Protecting digital content rights and ownership, be it photos, videos, audio or text, is one of the biggest challenges today, and even large media conglomerates struggle with piracy. Additionally, often enough, content creators find themselves at the mercy of service providers who have monopolized the digital content industry.

Fortunately, blockchain technology, which has been in the spotlight throughout last year (thanks to Bitcoin), can be adapted to solve these challenges, and a group of top entrepreneurs is planning to do just that with NKOR.

NKOR – A Decentralized Marketplace which Protects Digital Data Ownership

NKOR is an ambitious project, which at the very basic level, utilizes a novel multi-layered indexing technique and hash masks any content, recording the authentication data on the blockchain and time-stamping it as proof of origin.

This simply means, any content uploaded on NKOR will have its own proof of ownership and originality recorded on the blockchain, which can then be publicly verified and compared with other copies of the same content to track piracy and plagiarism.

While existing platforms mostly rely on human moderators, NKOR’s reliance on smart contracts to create a complete ecosystem which allows original content creators to securely distribute their data and benefit from it as it spreads.

Additionally, NKOR will also include a decentralized marketplace module which can operate without the need for any centralized authority, and gives content creators a secure avenue to trade, sell, or allow third-parties to access their data without fearing copyright infringement.

Backed by Top Entrepreneurs

Idea, concept and technology aside, NKOR also seems to have an impressive group of entrepreneurs backing it up. CEO and co-founder Eric Klein, believes that NKOR can provide a much more comprehensive digital content protection framework than existing methods:

"Throughout 11 years of experience in the media industry, I dealt with copyright infringement on a daily basis, such as illegal downloading of original content. Today, companies use content monitoring agencies to track whether copyright infringement has occurred, but it is not even close to full copyright protection. With the help of NKOR, proving of whether the document belongs to you or not has become much easier".

Eric is joined by Ivan Didur, who is the co-founder and CTO, with extensive experience in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Distributed Systems. Apart from teaching at the Blockchain School in Kiev, Ivan is also the co-founder of DataRoot Labs, in Ukraine, which is one of the country’s largest Big Data teams

Additionally, the project has the backing of Ophir Gertner, the co-founder of Invest and Stox, a blockchain-powered prediction markets platform which raised over $30 million in its ICO last year.

Other backers include Andrey Yashunsky from Da Vinci Capital, David Mickler from QVentures and Anatoliy Melnichuk from SnapSaves, which was acquired by Groupon.

NKOR Token Sale Details

The NKOR ICO is scheduled to start on March 3, 2018 and end on April 2, 2018, and of the 200 million issued NKR tokens, 40 million will be available for sale at a fixed price (in ETH), and the distributed NKR tokens will constitute the total amount of available liquidity.

Funds from the token sale will be utilized in further development and expansion, with the team behind NKOR expected to grow from 50 to 100 in the next two months.