Contractors Threaten to Sue Blockchain Startup KodakOne over Outstanding Fees

KodakOne, the blockchain based rights management and protection platform for photographers, owes over $100K to contractors hired to develop its platform.

KodakOne has been accused by a group of contractors of refusing to make payments of their contracting fees. The professionals want the company to make payments for outstanding invoices as agreed in their terms of employment.

KodakOne gained popularity after it announced that it was releasing an Initial Coin Offering as a means of raising funds for an intellectual property rights and photograph distribution platform. It also announced that they planned to release KodakCoin, its native token. The project was initially overseen by RYDE Holdings (formerly Wenn Digital). Kodak’s stock surged over 200% on the New York Stock Exchange after the announcement, but it plummeted significantly since then.

Although the company executives are still promoting the project at various events worldwide, development on the platform has stalled.

In September, Global Blockchain, a lead investor in KodakOne, announced that the platform will partner with Lobster which is an Artificial Intelligence and machine learning-based platform that enables photographers and social media platform users to monetize their pictures and videos. Through this partnership, KodakOne was to support and monitor over 10 million images and videos that were stored in Lobster database.

Jan Denecke, CEO at RYDE Holdings, said that the launch of their partnership with Lobster is a perfect use case for their mission, giving photographers, artists as well as smartphone users full control of how their images are used across the web.

KodakOne Post-Licensing Portal (PLP) was also launched last month. It introduced the PLP as the first pillar of services in the KodakOne platform. They claimed that it would be able to handle 1 billion images in a second and that it could provide prospective image right infringers with a simple way of accessing image usage rights retroactively without any legal or licensing issues.