A New York startup called Mine Labs has started a metadata protocol based on blockchain technology called Mediachain that uses the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a “hypermedia distribution protocol,” to protect rights to digital works, according to Nasdaq. Other blockchain-based authentication systems use an encoded ID to reference centrally-hosted data, but these have limited storage per transaction.
To encrypt and store digital rights onto the bitcoin blockchain, most blockchain startups do one of two things: 1) they encode an ID onto the blockchain using OP_RETURN or CoinSpark to reference centrally-hosted data, or 2) they use a custom-built distributed ledger to attach metadata directly to transactions.
Source: CCN