Louison Dumont, a 17 year-old entrepreneur, has partnered with venture capital investor and Draper Fischer Jurveson founder Tim Draper to launch Bitproof, a platform which enables individuals and organizations to digitally establish contracts and legal documents using the blockchain.
Bitproof
Currently, the startup is focused on creating digital seals and issuing cryptographic keys to create unique university diplomas, due to the rising number of fraudulent university certificates and documents. Today, it is ridiculously easy to counterfeit university diplomas because there is no public and readily available system in existence proving their validity.
The platform’s key tool SealX uses bank-grade encryption to issue cryptographic keys to authenticate and encode the document onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitproof’s SealX enables organizations to verify the documents transparently via the Bitcoin blockchain by searching the unique cryptographic keys encoded onto the diploma or the document.
Bitproof’s primary goal is to decrease the number of fraudulent university diplomas and to convince Ivy League universities and world-class academic institutions to issue digitally signed certificates. There’s a good chance that one of the first institutions to implement this technology would be Tim Draper’s very own entrepreneurship school Draper University, which offers its own free Bitcoin course and has enrolled thousands of students.
Finding a Use-Case
Dumont left his hometown in France and relocated to Silicon Valley at the age of 17 to create a document authentication system. Dumont created a working prototype by himself of what is now known as the SealX, and was later accepted into Boost VC, the California-based bitcoin focused incubator.
During his stay at Boost VC, he began to develop the Bitproof platform full-time, at the Boost VC headquarters in San Francisco. However, he struggled to find a use-case for his technology, and how to target its users. Initially, Dumont decided to target freelancer workers and employers.
“It can be very useful for people who do freelance work, and they want that client to pay. You can say I did this and gave it to my client, so he must pay. And if he doesn’t, you can say I have created that,” he told Coindesk in an interview.
Few months later, Dumont secured an undisclosed investment from investor Tim Draper, and began searching for ways to implement the Bitproof platform to authenticate and encode university certificates and diplomas.
“Dumont and his team have developed a very intuitive software for universities to let them issue digital diplomas in a secure environment (256 bits encryption and 2FA),” reported Geeky. “Each graduate is given a paper diploma, and a Digital Diploma Number (DDN). If this system spreads, job applicants will soon include DDNs on their resume.”
Dumont provided Geeky with a prototype of the digital encryption system: