Meet MassChallenge Civic Tech Scholar Inkrypt

| Farhan Javed, Co-Founder and Corporate Development lead, Inkrypt

Inkrypt is a distributed media hosting platform focused on building a censorship-resistant internet infrastructure for journalism and media. Inkrypt seeks to create a comprehensive media ecosystem for the Web 3.0 by becoming a one-stop shop for content aggregation and distribution and partnering with synergistic companies like Po.et for service integrations such as cryptographic content attribution and licensing.

At the heart of civic innovation is the goal to foster citizen participation and increase the transparency between governments and their constituents. It is fitting then that Inkrypt’s mission is to not only eliminate single-to-few points of failure in media hosting and devolve deep concentrations of network power that currently acquiesce to or are subverted by malicious actors who seek to manipulate the flow of information, but also to create a journalist-led governance model to monitor content in an ethical fashion. As a result, Inkrypt will aid citizens across the globe in overcoming information asymmetries, whether that is from a lack of news or an infusion of misinformation, in order to facilitate the functioning of a robust, democratic society.

As part of its greater effort to empower journalists and make information truly free, both at home and abroad, Inkrypt is launching its very first product offering, nLIGHTn, which is a decentralized application for journalistic publishing that combines a peer-to-peer, encrypted storage protocol with an anonymity overlay that ensures comprehensive front-to-back-end censorship-resistance. The Harvard-based team conducted the very first live demo of the DApp on July 19th, 2018 at the Distributed 2018 Conference in San Francisco.

In the coming weeks, the Inkrypt team will deploy nLIGHTn with freelance and citizen journalists in censorship-prone geographies, such as Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, and Turkey. “nLIGHTn will usher in a new era of freelance and citizen journalism that will not only inform and empower citizens of censorship-prone geographies but also facilitate production of valuable content for global consumption” says Dr. Muhammad Ali Chaudhary, Inkrypt’s co-Founder and systems architect. According to Farhan Javed, co-Founder and corporate development lead for Inkrypt, “With over two-thirds of the world’s population living in regions with limited access to information, nLIGHTn will be a liberating force that protects the creators of content as well as its consumers who, we believe, have the basic human right to know the truth.”

Inkrypt is honored to have been recognized by Microsoft and selected as a recipient of Microsoft’s Civic Technology Scholarship through the MassChallenge Accelerator Program. The Scholarship will go a long way in aiding Inkrypt’s efforts to deploy nLIGHTn with citizen journalists in some of the world’s most autocratic regions. Furthermore, it will open avenues of potential technical collaboration between the Microsoft Office suite and the Inkrypt Protocol, further helping Inkrypt to become a true plug-and-play solution for media. Microsoft has a history of partnering with journalistic outlets, such as The Associated Press, to enable sources to more easily uncover data-driven stories. Inkrypt is very keen on exploring synergies of a similar vein and seeking collaboration with other like-minded ventures being groomed through MassChallenge.

Contact Information:

Farhan Javed is a senior at Harvard College studying Economics and Government and is also both the co-Founder and Corporate Development lead for Inkrypt. Javed was born in Saudi Arabia and is of Pakistani ancestry, spending much of his later life in Canada and the United States. Javed comes from a financial background, with experience in cryptocurrency exchange analysis, economic research on the macroeconomic impacts of oil price fluctuations at the Central Bank of Armenia, and investment banking in Citi’s Mergers & Acquisitions Group. Javed is a freedom of information advocate and is passionate about utilizing technology to create social impact in a sustainable and economically feasible fashion that will facilitate a freer tomorrow.