Alibaba, IBM and Mastercard Play the Lead in Blockchain Apps Development, New Report Says

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by Sofiko Abeslamidze · 3 min read
Alibaba, IBM and Mastercard Play the Lead in Blockchain Apps Development, New Report Says
Photo: Leon Lee / Flickr

The world’s most populous country has filed a prevail number of blockchain patent applications leaving the U.S. a poor second in the race for technology dominance.

Now officially China has proved to be number one digital economy that moves along fostering the robust development of blockchain-related business environment. Yet the captured position was quite a goal.

Following hopeful claims and ambitious efforts paving a thorny path towards Chinese technology dominance over the innovative arena, the country made numerous attempts to ban cryptocurrency and, therefore, to outroot entire blockchain ecosystem out of the country. Nevertheless, these events took place before the government had finally realized the enormous potential behind the cutting-edge blockchains. Starting from then, Chinese authorities have struggle to fuel the blockchain expansion delivering both favorable regulatory frameworks and financial support for the companies operating within the industry.

Previously Coinspeaker reported that a digital currency research lab set up by the People’s Bank of China has submitted 41 patent applications during the first year since its launch, while the robust technology itself was approved as a “new generation” of technologies that are “reconstructing the global innovation map and reshaping the global economic structure.”

Those efforts bore fruit during the past year as the recent survey conducted by the global intellectual property information media outlet, iPR Daily ranked Chine as the world’s leading supplier of blockchain applications. According to the report, China-based companies took 57 spots in a newly compiled “Top-100 Blockchain Enterprise Patent Rankings” with Alibaba at top of the list covering a total of 90 patent applications focused on blockchain-related technologies.

China filed more patent applications than the U.S. last year, with technology companies such as Tencent Holdings and Baidu accounting for 56% of the worldwide total of 406. Applications from the U.S. came a distant second at 22%. The U.S. still has the largest number of cumulative applications, but on an annual basis, China is in the lead.

Indeed, right after Alibaba is going IBM, which falls just one short of that total with 89 filings, while Mastercard occupies third place with 80 filings. Bank of America made it to fourth place, with 53 blockchain patent applications.

Notably, the People’s Bank of China ends up fifth on the list being one of the few central banks in the world to have moved into the blockchain industry with a total of 44 patent applications focused on its planned central bank digital currency.

Based on the IPRdaily research, applications related to underlying technologies such as access control, public key decryption, block construction and data processing accounted for about 50% of the total. The other half of the applications are mainly related to the application of blockchain technologies in various industries, such as identity authentication, drug tagging, food tracking, audit registration, financial institution information coordination, personal credit reporting and tax filing, and some other industrial applications.

It is worth to mention that the Alibaba’s payment subsidiary Ant Financial and Alipay utilizes blockchain in an agricultural sector ensuring the authenticity of rice produced in the northeastern provinces of the country by the means of non-tampering digital ledger. Baidu, on the other hand, launched a blockchain-related photo storage service Totem aimed at protecting the copyright of individual photographers and photo agencies.

For its ranking, iPR Daily said it consolidated information from patent databases as of Aug. 10 from China, the U.S., Europe, Japan and South Korea, as well as the International Patent System from the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Blockchain News, News
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