Patenting for Blockchain and Crypto Tech

By: Raj Paul, Gregory Discher & Mike Nonaka (Covington & Burling)

Update on the Digital Asset Industry

Despite reduced enthusiasm in the trading markets over the past couple of years, technological innovation and advancement from all corners of the crypto space has continued to thrive—including layer 2 scaling solutions for the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains, improvements to crypto mining equipment, novel applications for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), just to name a few. 

As we have previously covered in our articles, although open source innovation has always been a vital element in the development and operation of the crypto industry and the blockchain technology that lies at its heart, enterprises engaged in this area of technological development should consider securing intellectual property rights for their innovations.  This could include obtaining patents for inventions that complement or are adjacent to open decentralized public ledgers such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Patenting Activity for Cryptoassets and Other Blockchain Technology

As the graphs below indicate, patenting activity for cryptoassets and other blockchain-related innovations experienced a year-over-year increase for several years, though activity has tapered more recently…

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