An alternative to BlockchainyourIP

Start with the credential, because it is genuine

On 20 March 2025 the Tribunal Judiciaire de Marseille decided a counterfeiting dispute between AZ Factory and a Chinese company over pyjamas derived from sketches by the designer Alber Elbaz. AZ Factory produced a blockchain anchoring certificate containing the SHA-256 hashes of its creation files, anchored in May and September 2021. The court accepted it as establishing anteriority and treated it as contributing to establishing ownership of the copyright.

The anchoring had been done through BlockchainyourIP. Commentators described the decision as the first clear French recognition of blockchain timestamping in a civil counterfeiting action.

No other service in this category has anything comparable, ourselves included. If you are choosing partly on track record, that is a real point in their favour and you should weigh it.

What the ruling actually establishes

Here is the part worth thinking about, and it cuts both ways.

Read the decision and what persuaded the court was not the vendor. It was that a SHA-256 hash had been anchored in a public chain years before the dispute, and anyone could check it. The court treated it as documentary evidence because the record was reproducible and predated the conflict — not because a particular company had issued it.

That is the transferable lesson, and it is good news for anyone using any comparable service: the mechanism is what was accepted. It is also the reason the two properties that mattered are ones you should look for in whatever you use — anchored early, and verifiable by anyone.

What it does not establish is that a French first-instance decision binds anything. It is persuasive, widely reported, and one judgment. See is a blockchain timestamp valid in court for the full picture, including eIDAS, Italy's unimplemented Article 8-ter, China's much deeper practice and the US rules.

What BlockchainyourIP is built for

An IP department, not an individual. The product is a platform: dashboards, contributor and version traceability, activity reports, inactivity alerts, batch timestamping, SSO, self-hosting, one-click export, and integrations that timestamp code automatically on each commit through GitHub and GitLab.

Their stated segments are fashion, luxury, jewellery, watchmaking, design firms, software developers and agencies. Pricing is on request for both the Enterprise and Corporate Group tiers; no public price is published, which tells you the sales motion.

If you are managing a portfolio across a team, that is the right shape of product, and it is a great deal more product than we have.

Where the two genuinely differ

The substantive difference is what happens to the file.

BlockchainyourIP anchors only a fingerprint on-chain — correct, and the same as us. But the platform also offers to store the file itself, on their servers, your own servers, SharePoint or Azure. For an IP department that wants a system of record, storage is a feature.

We have no such option, because there is no upload at all. The hash is computed in your browser with the Web Crypto API and only that 64-character string is transmitted; there is no endpoint that accepts a file. For a pre-patent design or a document under NDA, that is the point — but it also means we cannot be your document management system, and we are not trying to be.

Where we lose, plainly

They have a court decision and we do not. They have the team tooling, the integrations, the batch workflow and the French institutional presence. If you need any of that, this comparison ends here and they are the answer.

Where we fit

For one document, by the person who owns it, where the file cannot go anywhere.

There is no demo, no quote and no plan. The price is on the page. Each certificate is its own Ethereum transaction with the payload hash written into the input data as readable text, so anyone can open it on Etherscan, choose "View as UTF-8", and check it with no software and no cooperation from us.

That last property is worth weighing against the court citation rather than beneath it. A judgment tells you a court accepted this kind of evidence once. A record that verifies on a public explorer without any vendor tells you the evidence survives whatever happens to the vendor — which, in a field where WIPO closed its own service in 2022, is not a hypothetical.

Choose BlockchainyourIP if

• You are protecting a portfolio across a team rather than a document.
• You want the file stored and managed, not just fingerprinted.
• You need automatic timestamping on commit, or batch across dozens of files.
• The French court decision matters to your counsel, and a procurement process is not an obstacle.

Choose us if

• The file must not be uploaded anywhere, including to the service issuing the proof.
• You want a published price and no sales call.
• You timestamp occasionally and do not want a plan running between uses.
• You want the proof readable directly from a public transaction by someone who has never heard of either company.

Both anchor a SHA-256 hash to a public chain, and on the evidence of Marseille that is the part the court cared about.