The founder and CEO of Yoast, the popular WordPress SEO plugin, has acquired a stake in a blockchain startup.
It is WordProof, a company that is building an ecosystem based on timestamps registered on the blockchain.
The startup recently announced that it has received a grant from Block.one’s EOS VC grant program, and funding from the Noord-Holland Innovation Fund. It also received one million euros thanks to its first place in the final round of the European competition “Blockchain for Social Good”.
Yoast is a company with more than 100 employees, more than 90 of them based in Wijchen, the Netherlands. Its popular Yoast SEO plugin is active on over 10 million websites and is one of the three most popular WordPress plugins.
WordProof already offers its own WordPress plug-in, which allows assigning a timestamp to a website’s content on the EOSIO blockchain, without the need to program anything, and without requiring any experience in the field.
In this way, it is possible not only to certify the publication date of the content, but also to show users a pop-up of the certificate on the blockchain.
It is therefore no surprise that the founder of Yoast, Joost de Valk, and the current CEO Marieke van de Rakt have acquired a stake in this Dutch startup founded in 2019 by Sebastiaan van der Lans, with Frank van Dalen as an angel investor and partner.
Now WordProof aims to offer certified content with timestamps optimized for search engines.
Sebastiaan van der Lans, founder and CEO of the company, said:
“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”.
Joost de Valk added:
“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”.
