Telefónica Tech, the Madrid-based telecoms company behind O2 and Vivo, has launched its own blockchain-based document certification service.

The new service utilises Telefónica’s in-house TrustOS platform to generate certificates that combine the digital signature of the user with a trace of the content to be certified, alongside a time stamp to establish the date of certification.

It will allow companies to generate digital evidence of authorship, ownership, and integrity for the dynamic history of versions and interactions of any digital format, be that files, images, emails, and so on.

The service outshines current methods of using digital signatures which only offer guarantees for specific versions of PDF documents.

In a statement announcing the service, Telefónica listed some of the use cases as such:

• Training: Certificates of attendance to courses, congresses and trade fairs, academic qualifications and professional accreditations.
• Industrial property: Business secrecy, software deposit, trademark protection, infringement of protected content, safeguarding of engineering projects and construction plans.
• Products: Certificates and compliance with warranty conditions, authenticity and limited series, proof of origin and/or ownership, evidence of preservation and transmissions.
• Media: Authorship of images and multimedia content, registration of original content, among others.

The company’s legal department is also working on a pilot project to use the service to track confidential information across a variety of other projects.

For Luis Prendes, global head of legal affairs and digital legal transformation at Telefónica, “the incorporation of innovative technologies such as blockchain in the management of contracts and legal documentation, in general, is a key step for the secure digital transformation of companies.

This innovative solution provides full traceability of sensitive information leaving the company’s perimeter and can deal much more efficiently with day-to-day problems such as information leaks and breaches of confidentiality clauses.”

Want to learn more from executives at the heart of this space? The Blockchain IoT Solutions Congress, on November 2, 2021, will explore the convergence of these two technologies and the use cases and industries that will benefit.