The problem BlockStream solves

Recently, P2P technology has become so popular that a large number of files are being exchanged by millions of users concurrently. However, due to the significant growth of P2P file sharing, even copyrighted files are also actively exchanged so copyright infringement has become a serious issue. In particular, P2P file sharing is recognized as a killer application for the P2P technology, and several P2P file sharing systems have been used by many users from the late 90‟s to the present, including Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa and Bit Torrent. However, the popularization of such P2P file sharing causes several undesired issues in recent years, such as the illegal sharing of copyrighted contents violating the copyright law and the act as a hotbed of cyber-crimes such as phishing scams and leaks of personal information. In this paper we provide the summary of various research done on adding DRM support in P2P connection so as to stop illegal content distribution.

Challenges we ran into

1. NuCypher suite is not available in the browser. The reference implementation is in python which makes it difficult to perform the decryption on the client.
2. Setting up the blockchain development environment.
3. Integrating IPFS, NuCypher and ethereum networks.