How Spice AI is Helping Safeguard Digital Assets & On-Chain Marketplace Interactions

Executive Summary

Yakoa is the AI-driven IP protection network — pioneering tools that safeguard digital assets and ensure on-chain interactions are secure and transparent. By dismantling fraudulent operations, Yakoa strives to make digital asset markets safer for all participants.

Yakoa approached Spice AI to aid them in solving the unique and ambitious challenge of determining provenance for digital assets in Web3. It was mission-critical for Yakoa to be able to track every version of every NFT ever created across all platforms, all while navigating the diverse set of NFT standards and the blend of on-chain records with off-chain media that dominates the Web3 ecosystem today. This case study will explore the partnership between Spice AI and Yakoa and how Yakoa is leveraging Spice AI’s enterprise-grade data and infrastructure to achieve their goals.

Yakoa’s Story & Mission

BoBorn from the vision of co-founders Andrew Dworschak and Graham Robinson, Yakoa delivers AI-powered IP protection for blockchains. Brands, Web3 creators, and marketplaces are leveraging Yakoa to protect intellectual property from duplication, manipulation, and scams. As serial entrepreneurs, the co-founders quickly saw the potential of Web3 and understood the emerging risks tied to intellectual property. The pair envisioned a safer digital world where creativity is celebrated and securely preserved. Yakoa is the product of their steadfast commitment to bringing that vision to life.

Yakoa is building the safety layer of Web3 for the next generation of the internet. Its AI-powered platform diligently scans blockchains, identifying and flagging potential infringements as they surface, ensuring each digital asset's authenticity. Spice AI supports and believes in Yakoa's vision of a digital future where originality is recognized, respected, and rewarded.

Beyond providing the data building blocks behind Yakoa’s purpose-built indexer, Spice AI is a member of its community of innovators, creators, and collectors. The community is unified in its commitment to safeguarding the value of digital creativity in the Web3 ecosystem.

Partnering with Spice AI

In order to provide IP protection, Yakoa needed to determine provenance* for digital assets in Web3. To determine provenance, Yakoa needed to be able to track every version of every NFT ever created across every blockchain, which required processing and enabling query access to millions of rows of data at once. The scale of this data challenge was further amplified by the requirement to track similar images, such as when they are flipped, recolored, or manipulated by generative AI.

​​Before partnering with Spice AI, Yakoa had engaged another well-known Web3 data provider to help them overcome this challenge. However, the provider's APIs were not flexible enough to accommodate Yakoa's unique data needs, making the indexing process prohibitively expensive.

“What we can do in Spice with a single query would take millions of API calls in other platforms.” <div class="author_name">Andrew Dworschak</div><div class="author_title">CEO & Co-founder of Yakoa</div>

Yakoa approached Spice AI requiring an enterprise data platform with high-performance guarantees. Spice AI enabled Yakoa to automatically identify NFTs across standards and aggregate them into a single, queryable table.

Learn more about Spice AI and Yakoa’s partnership by reading our Partnership Announcement blog post here.

*NFTs simplify the process of establishing legitimacy for digital artworks by offering a means for individuals to verify their ownership of a piece (provenance) of art through tokens. The information stored on an immutable blockchain ledger remains unalterable, and any changes are reflected in the existing records. Furthermore, NFTs reduce the need for intermediaries typically involved in verifying asset authenticity, providing a more cost-effective alternative to seeking validation from established patent offices or art galleries.

Determining Provenance for Digital Assets in Web3

To solve the challenge of determining provenance for digital assets, Yakoa and Spice AI leveraged the best-in-class token detection features of the Spice AI platform.

Best-in-Class Features of the Spice AI Platform

The detection and categorization of tokens is core to understanding blockchain activity for Yakoa and other Web3-based businesses. This includes determining token transfers, NFT mints or airdrops, and much more.

• Spice supports automation of explicit token identification at the contract level and implicit identification through higher-order datasets, such as nft_transfers or nft_airdrops.
• By using token standard definitions, token identification can be automated from blockchain primitives, such as blocks, transactions, logs, ABIs, and events.

Learn more about Spice AI’s best in class token detection here.
If you are working with Ethereum token and NFT data, follow the Tokens and NFTs tutorial toget started.

How the Spice AI Platform is Empowering Yakoa

The Spice AI platform’s low-latency indexing makes results available to Yakoa within 100 milliseconds. It takes just <1 second for core data and 2.5 seconds* for enriched data to query availability from the time a block is seen. The next closest solution to the Spice AI platform has a block time latency of 10 seconds, while the industry standard takes more than 30 minutes.

Not only does the Spice AI platform let Yakoa gain true provenance all the way back to Genesis block, but it also allows them to query real-time and historical data in the same query. The Spice AI platform indexes raw NFT metadata, including newer NFT standards like ERC1155, in addition to extracting the metadata fields, which is important for Yakoa as an IP protection company where thoroughness and breadth of coverage is paramount.

Leveraging Spice Functions

In addition to aiding Yakoa in determining provenance for digital assets in Web3, Spice AI supported Yakoa in overcoming the challenge of tracing changes to digital assets throughout their history by leveraging Spice Functions.

To prove provenance, Yakoa also required a history of changes to digital assets that would allow them to trace back to the first time they were changed. Achieving this goal is extremely difficult in a pure SQL warehouse. However, by pairing with Spice Functions, the task was completed with relative ease.

Spice Functions is a hosted compute experience that enables developers to write code in their preferred language and run it on the Spice platform, co-located with Spice data. Yakoa uses Spice functions to create a detailed log of NFT updates, backed by fully-auditable blockchain data.

Through Spice Functions, new use cases are enabled for developers building intelligent applications with time-series and blockchain data, including flexible data transformation and aggregations, AI/ML data preparation, alerting, filtering, and integrations with other services. Currently, Spice Functions can be implemented in Python or Go, with support for Node.js and Rust coming soon.

Take a deeper dive into Spice Functions here.

The Outcome of Our Collaboration

As a result of the partnership between Yakoa and Spice AI, Yakoa was able to achieve the mission-critical goal of determining provenance of digital assets in Web3. In leveraging the enterprise-grade data and infrastructure of the Spice AI platform, Yakoa has made great strides toward realizing their vision of a safer digital world where creativity is celebrated and securely preserved.

Where We Are Now & Where We Are Going Next

Yakoa continues to leverage the enterprise-grade offerings of the Spice AI platform and is excited to work closely with Spice AI on Spice Functions. As a product of the collaboration, Yakoa’s data will be queryable from the launch of Spice AI’s community edition. Every member of the Spice AI community will be able to benefit from access to Yakoa’s rich data to better understand and protect their digital assets.

Yakoa recently bundled their services into a fully-featured Brand Protection Portal, allowing brands to submit their official IP for monitoring. Through it, brands can streamline their IP workflow with infringement cases and issue one-click takedown requests.

Having developed a robust range of data, AI, and infrastructure solutions, Spice AI continues  doubling down on servicing the needs of enterprise customers. Currently, Spice AI is working with a wide spectrum of enterprise businesses from a diverse range of industries.