Sebastiaan van der Lans is the Founder of WordProof & Chairman of the Trusted Web Foundation. Sebastiaan is an open source nerd who won Europe’s Blockchains for Social Good contest in 2020 for his innovative dutch startup that is on a mission to restore trust in the internet through transparency and accountability via blockchain timestamping.

And with fraud, fake news, and privacy issues the internet has been  hungry for this! Within just 6 months of launching they had 162,173 timestamps, 25,000,000+ Unique Pageviews, and 17,000+ Views of WordProof content on youtube. And the spread across the internet keeps climbing. As of today, they have had 1,023,572+ articles, media files and legal documents time stamped by their product.

Full show notes and worksheets can be found here: evolvethe.world/episodes/sebastiaan-van-der-lans

What You Will Learn In This Episode:

• Why Sebastiaan was drawn to the web and the power of open source
• How community and open source democratize the internet
• Why Sebastiaan invested $60,000 of time into building a free GDPR plugin
• How to test out developers before hiring them for bigger projects
• The origin of blockchain and what drew Sebastiaan to it
• Why trust on the internet is such a big issue
• How Sebastiaan is going to save the internet with a digital fingerprint
• How to bring more transparency and accountability on the internet
• The "levels" strategy for making social media more believable
• The secret way Sebastiaan funded his blockchain startup
• How WordProof got it's first users
• How to explain something as complicated as blockchain to everyone from investors to policy makers
• The ultimate strategy to win a startup competition
• Why Sebastiaan started a nonprofit alongside his startup to educate people about the internet
• How the State of Misinformation has effected the internet
• How to not fall prey to misinformation
• How we can apply open source and community prinicples to other problems
• How to make the internet have more human to human connection
• How 5 minutes of time turned in 20k return on investment

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