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Yakoa<\/a>, an NFT fraud detection startup, has raised $4.8 million to build tools to fight intellectual property fraud in web3, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n One of the most common attacks Yakoa sees is people making copies of NFTs<\/a> and claiming them as their own work, Andrew Dworschak, co-founder of the startup, said.<\/p>\n Yakoa provides tools and an indexer that detects copies or infringement probabilities on original NFTs, ranging from direct forgery to partial or stylistic forgery, which will then notify platforms, brands or creators of these fraudulent activities.<\/p>\n The funding round was led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital and Brevan Howard Digital, with participation from Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO<\/a>, Uniswap Labs Ventures, Orange DAO, Time Zero Capital, gmjp, Sunset Ventures and FAST by GETTYLAB, as well as angel investors.<\/p>\n The capital will be used to grow its machine learning and data engineering teams internally, according to Graham Robinson, co-founder of Yakoa.<\/p>\n The platform identifies an NFT\u2019s first existence across a number of blockchains like Ethereum, Solana<\/a>, Avalanche<\/a>, Polygon<\/a> and more.<\/p>\n \u201cIn terms of blockchains, having every blockchain is on our road map,\u201d Dworschak said. \u201cThe belief we have is it doesn\u2019t matter where you mint IP or publish an address, what matters is that it\u2019s publicly verifiable.\u201d<\/p>\n Anyone can make \u201ca quick buck off of anyone,\u201d Dworschak noted. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard to protect against this stuff \u2019cause there\u2019s so many assets. In some cases [fraudsters are] photoshopping and cropping or changing colors, when they\u2019re really using someone else\u2019s IP.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we\u2019re doing an attribution search, we\u2019re trying to figure out where an asset might be derived from and give as much information as we can,\u201d Dworschak said. \u201cTwo assets can be similar and not fraudulent and that\u2019s completely appropriate. There\u2019s a lot of edge cases we need to be aware of and other ones that pop up in a similar vein and some use cases we take on as a platform and give people the chance to record their opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe entire ecosystem is open and we want to continue to make sure it stays that way,\u201d Robinson said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to create the tools for the industry to use and they can use it in their environment.\u201d<\/p>\n The name Yakoa came from the saying, \u201cA-OKAY,\u201d but backward, Dworschak said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re using the blockchain, you want to make sure it\u2019s \u2018A-OKAY,\u2019 so that\u2019s why we named it that.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, the NFT market has \u201calready demonstrated a lot of potential,\u201d Dworschak said. \u201cIt has created types of assets not bound to a specific platform that allows creators to publish their assets and trade them freely across platforms. It\u2019s a brand new method of commerce and it\u2019ll spill over to what\u2019s unimaginable today.\u201d<\/p>\n Long-term, fraud protection will be something that can run in the backend for platforms, Robinson said. \u201cThere\u2019s a bunch of services that can start from this IP protection.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n