What Happened to WIPO Proof

WIPO Proof launched in 2020 with something no competitor could manufacture: the name of the United Nations agency that administers international IP treaties. Two years later it was gone.

If you hold WIPO Proof tokens, or you are choosing a timestamping service and want to know what a shutdown looks like from the inside, this is the story and its consequences.

The timeline

May 2020 — WIPO launches WIPO Proof, a digital timestamping service issuing tamper-evident tokens proving a file existed at a moment.

September 2021 — Following a review carried out as part of its planning and budget exercise, WIPO decides to discontinue the service. The reason given is lack of demand. Trade press coverage at the time also points to the number of private-sector digital verification services that had appeared.

31 January 2022 — Token generation ends. It is no longer possible to create a new WIPO Proof token.

Around January 2027 — The five-year continuity window WIPO committed to for existing account holders is expected to close.

What happened to existing tokens

Two separate things, and conflating them causes unnecessary alarm.

The tokens remain valid. A WIPO Proof token is a cryptographic artefact, not a subscription. WIPO's guidance is that tokens remain valid indefinitely and can be verified using equivalent timestamping platforms or readily available open-source utilities. Nothing about the shutdown invalidates a token you already hold.

The account infrastructure has an end date. WIPO committed to five years of continuity for existing holders — dashboard access, verification, premium certificate generation, all provided free of charge. Counting from the January 2022 cutoff, that lands around January 2027.

If you have tokens sitting in a WIPO Proof account, the sensible move is to export everything now: the tokens, any certificates, and the original files they cover. Store them somewhere you control, and record which token covers which file. Doing this calmly today is considerably easier than doing it against a deadline.

Why it failed

WIPO's stated reason was lack of demand, and there is no reason to doubt it. Some plausible contributing factors:

• The market was small and already served. Free and low-cost timestamping existed. WIPO Proof was priced as an institutional service.
• The value was reputational, and reputation is hard to sell as a feature. The technical function was commodity; the differentiator was the WIPO name, which appeals to a narrower audience than it might seem.
• It sat awkwardly beside WIPO's core work. WIPO administers treaties and registration systems. A timestamping utility is a different kind of product with different economics.

The lesson worth taking

The shutdown is a useful stress test for how you think about proof infrastructure, and it points at something specific.

WIPO Proof's value came from WIPO vouching for it. When WIPO stopped, the ongoing service stopped. The tokens survived only because they are independently verifiable artefacts rather than database entries — had the design required WIPO's servers to confirm anything, the shutdown would have destroyed them.

That is the property to look for. When you choose a service to create records you may need in ten years, ask what happens to the record if the company disappears. If the answer involves logging into anything, the record has a dependency it does not need.

Our own answer: each certificate corresponds to one Ethereum transaction whose input data contains the payload hash as readable text. Open it on any block explorer, choose "View as UTF-8", compare. No account, no software, no cooperation from us — the same test WIPO Proof's tokens passed, and the reason they are still worth something.

What to use now

If you specifically valued the institutional backing, national deposit services are the closest equivalent — France's e-Soleau at INPI, for example — and note that these generally require depositing the file itself.

If what you valued was a verifiable dated record, the WIPO Proof alternative page covers the options and what each one asks of you.