How Ascribe Uses Bitcoin to Protect Artists

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The inventor of the Internet got a raw deal.

So says Trent McConaghy, CTO of Ascribe, a startup that uses the bitcoin blockchain to timestamp intellectual property and create sustainable ownership structures for artwork and other digital media.

In a recent interview with CoinDesk, McConaghy, co-founder of the recently released “Towards an Internet of Ownership Layers” white paper, explained how his startup is providing artists and other independent creators with a base layer to create ownership rights for their work and protect those rights in subsequent publication.

The company has been in the works since 2013, when McConaghy and co-founders Masha McConaghy and Bruce Pon explored how the concept of ownership based on Bitcoin could be applied to other types of digital assets.

“Our question at the time was, ‘Why can’t we own digital art the same way we own bitcoin?’ That was the question that the company was thinking about in the early days.”

Ascribe recently announced that it had raised $2 million in seed funding from Earlybird Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Freelands Ventures, and other angel investors.

Early Development

According to McConaghy, his and his co-founders’ backgrounds strongly influenced the trajectory of the Ascribe project.

CEO Bruce previously worked in the financial services sector for several years, and Martha McConaghy was a professional art planner and exhibitor, working in Paris, Berlin and Vancouver, and received a PhD in the relationship between business and art.

McConaghy, who founded and developed the tech company Solido, which makes industrial automation software, said he began to look into Bitcoin in 2010, and later came up with the basic idea for Ascribe, consulting with artists working in digital media as the project developed.

McConaghy explained:

“We started exploring this technology, and we talked to different artist friends, and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ve wanted something like this before.’ Electronic artists are hackers and technologists, so they think about this and live and breathe technology.”

Ownership Platform

By the fall of 2013, the team had registered the title claim on the Bitcoin blockchain. Over the next few months, they evolved the initial concept into plans for a platform that McConaghy says aims to provide creators with an easy-to-use platform to create title to their work and track usage of their work.

“We realized we could use copyright law as a foundation, and that was also very easy to use, and use blockchain as a way to record these registration copyright transactions, ownership transfer transactions, A to B authorizations, like delegations,” he explained.

Ascribe officially launched in February, and had an internal beta version in the fall of 2014. The most recent tool to be developed is an internal search engine. The search tool is currently in internal beta, and is being discussed with artists looking for ways to track the distribution of their works.

He added: “This is really about designing for ownership. What we’re trying to do is meet the needs of these artists.”

McConaghy says that for him and the rest of the Ascribe team, moving ahead means further improving the platform and making it easier to use: “Our view is let a hundred flowers bloom. We want to make the digital ownership process extremely simple and extremely easy.