Bank of America Has the Most Blockchain Patents, But Is It Actually Going to Use Them?

On October 30, Bank of America added yet another cryptocurrency-related patent to its collection of more than 50 applications filed within the same field.

The second-largest bank in the US has been leading in the informal blockchain patent race, sidestepping such players as IBM and Alibaba.

The bank filed its first blockchain-related patent back in March 2014, and it was published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office - the agency that awards copyrights on inventions in the country - in September 2015.

"As a technologist, the technology is fascinating. We have tried to stay on the forefront. I think we have somewhere around 15 patents, most people would be surprised at Bank of America with patents in the blockchain or cryptocurrency space."

Eventually, BofA secured the first place in an unofficial patent race - by June 2018, the institution held around 45 live patents, the largest amount among all companies, according to research from Marc Kaufman, an attorney co-chairing the Blockchain Intellectual Property Council at the U.S. Chamber of Digital Commerce.

The U.S. bank bypassed such technology-oriented players as IBM and Alibaba, not to mention its direct competitors - Royal Bank of Canada was the second among all banks, holding only eight patents.

In August 2018, Michael Wuehler, a blockchain specialist at ConsenSys, who previously worked at BofA for more than 11 years, as per his LinkedIn profile, took to Twitter to announce that while his name is listed on "8 of 50" BofA blockchain patents as an inventor, they are "Meaningless" from his perspective.

A blockchain patent, like any other patent, is a set of exclusive rights issued by an official authority - a sovereign state or intergovernmental organization - that an inventor or assignee gets in exchange for revealing their invention to the public.

As Bloomberg explains, business-wise blockchain patents "Are an essential ingredient for companies looking to reshape the financial services industry or spawn profitable cryptocurrency-related businesses." Essentially, patents help companies attract investment, protect property rights and collect monopoly profits from other companies using their inventions - and that could be the case with BofA.BofA's latest patent filings: from private keys storage to cryptocurrency exchange systemHere are some details of BofA's blockchain efforts published by the USPTO within the past year.

The patent describes how the system would record information on the blockchain based on "Aggregated information associated with past transfer of resources executed by an entity," and would update the information on the blockchain with each new transaction activity.