Stampery: Replacing notaries with Bitcoin blockchain technology

Stampery, a startup that wants to use bitcoin’s blockchain to replace notaries with legally binding proofs of all your sensitive documents, showed off the next version of its service today at Disrupt San Francisco.

“We use the Bitcoin blockchain to prove the existence, integrity, and ownership of any document,” Daniele Levi, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told me in a phone interview before Disrupt. “Blockchain is essentially a decentralized database. We use this technology to generate proofs for documents.”

You can certify any document with Stampery. All you have to do is email it to your personal Stampery email address, upload it using the Stampery website, integrate Stampery into your product via the API, or connect Stampery to your Dropbox.

"You can generate immutable, accurate proof of the existence and integrity of any file. Anyone in the world can automatically prove at no cost that a file was created at a certain time and has not been modified since then," Levy said.

The reasons for using Stampery are the same as those for notarizing documents. It is great for protecting intellectual property, certifying the validity of wills, oaths, contracts, communications in family disputes, and more.

Compared to document notarization, the advantage of Stampery is that you don't have to take paper documents to the notary in person, which can save a lot of time. For users who send less than 100 files per month and use less than 1GB of storage space, Stampery is free. For a monthly fee of $9.99, you can store up to 10,000 files and expand the storage space to 100GB.

“We are not a trusted attestor. This means that even if Stampery ceases to exist, every certificate we generate can still be verified,” Levi said. “We don’t have a centralized database that can be hacked.” Because legal certificates are stored on the blockchain, anyone can retrieve them. This is what makes Stampery different from other electronic notarization services.

When I asked about Stampery’s legal value, Levi’s answer was candid. “Because the concept of blockchain is still so new, no one has used it in court yet. But once someone uses it, the judge will have to accept it. Not accept it out of a certain point of view, but it must be accepted logically.”

Because it is so easy to use, Stampery offers a much greater advantage than traditional notarization for professionals who rely heavily on notarized documents. Although the market is small, the company is likely to capture a high share of this market.

Stampery: Using blockchain to notarize documents

Question and Answer Session

Judges: Hunter Walk and Michelle Zatlyn of CloudFlare, Matt Turck of FirstMark Capital, Alexandra Chong of Lulu

Q: Who are your target customers? You said that there are currently 700 people using your services. What kind of people are they?

A: We have three types of users—lawyers who need to certify documents, creators who need to certify images and videos, and startups who want to protect their intellectual property. All of the integrations we roll out over time will help us reach the hundreds of millions of Dropbox users directly, and eventually users on platforms like Salesforce.

Q: How do you get the government to recognize your services?

A: Our service is more convenient and more secure. Trust creates security vulnerabilities and additional costs. Our trustless system can be independently verified anywhere in the world.

Q: How does your service protect intellectual property?

A: You can notarize the prior art. You can find the prior art. It's similar to a defensive patent.

Stampery Leverages The Blockchain To Certify All Your Documents