Overlai: Protecting Art and Authenticity (Now and Tomorrow) with Aptos

In recent years, artist work has been stolen, manipulated, and used without consent to train AI. Some platforms have even enabled AI scraping by default. Overlai's co-founders, Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen, are uniquely positioned to tackle this issue. As world-renowned photographers and conservationists, they’ve created a solution to protect endangered art. 

Cristina, a founder of the International League of Conservation Photographers and co-founder of Sea Legacy, and Paul, a biologist and award-winning photographer with 20 years at National Geographic, and co-founder of Sea Legacy, know the stakes first‑hand. 

“When I look at my pictures of narwhals, for example, those images took five years to capture. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. I dislocated my shoulder. I crashed two airplanes,” Paul reflects. “And if I'm working that hard, other artists around the world are all working equally hard to create their bodies of work, and they need to be able to control that.”

Overlai Protects Creators from AI

Overlai is an app that puts an invisible watermark with creator credentials on every image, and records ownership details on the Aptos blockchain, thus providing an immutable record of provenance. This ownership is retained no matter how many times the media is compressed, captured via screenshots, or converted, and it remains constant no matter where the media is posted online or otherwise.

“Once you Overlai an image forevermore, it will have your provenance. It will let the world know that you were the creator and that it belongs to you,” Cristina explains.

While the app's primary functionality has been to protect images, the founding team’s vision extends far beyond that. Their goal is to ultimately empower filmmakers, videographers, and creators of all kinds—establishing a new standard for provenance across the creative world and enabling everyday users to opt-out of AI. 

“I built Overlai originally to protect my life's work, but now I'm building it for all of my peers and every artist going forward and for the entire creative economy,” Paul says.

Under the Hood: The Most Feature-Rich Blockchain

Technically speaking, Overlai uses a read-and-write-only distributed ledger technology provided by Aptos, decentralized storage provided by IPFS, and advanced dataset protections to store each piece of content securely. This process records the content’s past, originators, and any modifications performed. A custom smart contract assigns the ​​metadata of each asset, highlighting restrictions around AI scraping with accordance to the C2PA standard.

“There were two key factors that went into our technical evaluation of Aptos. One: knowing that it was built to handle the internet scale is what we were looking for. The second was a combination of reliability and security,” says Cristina. “We’re building to protect the next generation of creators, so we need a platform that’s equally scalable, secure, and future‑proof.”

While there’s sophisticated infrastructure under the hood, the external user experience couldn't be more simple. Overlai is a one-click experience, completely abstracting blockchain activity from the user. So whether you're a professional photographer using the mobile app or a parent wanting to protect your children’s photos from AI mimicry, you won’t even realize you’re interacting with the world’s fastest blockchain in production behind the scenes.

Scoring Authentic Wins and Driving Blockchain Adoption Forward

Protecting art and authenticity in the digital age has never been more important. Overlai arrived at the perfect time, becoming a leader in the provenance vertical—enabling everyday users to be able to publically verify the authenticity of their content.

Overlai has amassed an active community geared around protecting the rights of creators and supported by world-leading photographers as its ambassadors. They’ve joined the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) along with other major companies, like NVIDIA, Sony, the BBC, Microsoft and are making headway in incorporating their technology into the standard itself.

As Paul sums up: “Here's why Overlai is built different: we've got an industry leading watermark, account abstraction for a seamless user experience, community and industry advisors, top partners within the C2PA community—and with Aptos as our technology backbone, we're positioned to scale and bring the next billion users on to the blockchain.”