TreeQuest · a Northstar project · very early
A patent or copyright filing takes time, money, and knowledge most independent creators and inventors don't have lying around — and that gap is exactly where people get exploited. TreeQuest gives you a real cryptographic record that your work existed, on this date, before anyone else's claim, so you can keep shipping and selling right now instead of sitting on your hands waiting for paperwork.
A formal patent or copyright registration can take months and real money most creators don't have on day one. In that window, an idea or a piece of work can get copied, sampled, or claimed by someone with a lawyer on retainer — and there's often no independent record of who actually made it first.
Sit on the work until formal protection clears, afraid that showing it or selling it early gives someone else the opening to take it. Momentum, income, and audience all stall in the meantime.
Email yourself a screenshot, hash a PDF by hand, hope a timestamp on a file is enough. It's better than nothing, but it's not independently verifiable, and most of it was never checked against how it'd actually hold up.
Three things TreeQuest actually does.
Your work is hashed and the hash is Ed25519-signed with a real UTC timestamp — the same signing discipline Northstar already uses for Bait-Mask's license system, not an ad-hoc "email it to yourself" trick. Independently verifiable, offline, by anyone.
List and sell your work directly while your formal patent or copyright filing is still pending. You don't have to choose between staying protected and staying quiet.
No equity, no ownership stake in what you make — a platform whose entire premise is protecting your ownership doesn't get to also claim a piece of it. The 3% only applies to actual profit, and only once there is any. If a sale doesn't net you anything, TreeQuest takes nothing from it either.
Describe what you made. This hashes the content (SHA-256 — proves what you made, byte for byte) and binds it to the current UTC time in a signed certificate (proves when) — the same two-part idea the real proof-of-creation record uses, run live in your browser.
The design goes through an on-order manufacturer — nothing is printed, sewn, or shipped until someone actually buys it. No inventory to front, no boxes in your hallway, no upfront cost to you at all.
A fan buys the hoodie. Only then does the factory print and ship it — the same on-demand model real print-on-demand providers already run in production, not something TreeQuest is trying to build from scratch.
The manufacturer is paid what production actually costs. Everything left over is yours — TreeQuest isn't in that part of the transaction at all.
Same rule as everywhere else on this platform: 3% of what's left after production cost, and only when that number is positive. A slow month costs you nothing extra.
Same rule as every other product on this site: what's below is real and verified, not aspirational.
Trust & release state
This is early enough that talking to a real person who might use it will shape what gets built next.
Talk to us