The founders and owners of the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress, Yoast, have taken a stake in the Dutch startup WordProof. Yoast’s founder Joost de Valk, CEO Marieke van de Rakt and team bring over 10 million users, expertise and a large network to WordProof, who aim to make the internet safer using blockchain technology.
Founded in 2019, WordProof is on a mission to restore trust in the internet, fight fraud and battle fake news, with their ‘Timestamp Ecosystem’. This technology, which supports multiple blockchains, enables consumers and search engines to verify the source of content. Currently, WordProof offers a user-friendly WordPress-plugin with access the Timestamp Ecosystem to around one-third of all websites. It is also possible to timestamp documents with a standalone tool.
Yoast, founded in 2016, maintains the Yoast SEO plugin. Active on more than 10 million websites, this plugin is a staple of many WordPress sites and one of the top 3 most popular WordPress plugins. So far, the startup has grown a team of 100+ employees, with around 90+ staff based in Wijchen, the Netherlands.
With Yoast’s founders on board, Wordproof can offer timestamping content on the internet combined with search engine optimisation, providing opportunities to fight fake news and fraud on the internet. “Joost and Marieke bring valuable expertise that will help us create a universal timestamp standard, assuring that search engines can index the website in the best possible way,” commented WordProof’s founder and CEO, Sebastiaan van der Lans.
“From a publishing perspective, the ability to prove authorship, to unequivocally prove that you were first with a specific piece of content, is game-changing. With WordProof, unprecedented integrity can be brought to the world of content publishing and e-commerce in an open-source manner, which creates awesome opportunities for social sharing sites and search engines,” said Yoast’s founder Joost de Valk.
Recently, WordProof also announced that it had been awarded a grant from Block.one’s EOS VC Grant Program and financing by Noord-Holland Innovation Fund. Subsequently, WordProof was awarded a €1 million in Europe’s ‘Blockchains for Social Good’ competition, after securing first place in the final round.