IPwe and IBM are looking to bring the hot new crypto trend of NFTs to the business world.
GameStop mania aside, the boom in cryptocurrency trading has been the story captivating the investing world over the last six months. Bitcoin, the benchmark cryptocurrency, has seen its price climb nearly 600 percent over the past year, but that’s nothing compared to the explosion in NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, to the uninitiated. NFT mania has fueled an underground economy, with Internet users swapping the rights to NBA videos and dystopian works of art for millions of dollars.
For those not playing along online, NFTs are an offshoot of cryptocurrency that utilize blockchain technology to create proof of ownership of pretty much anything—even a tweet. The true value of a jpeg file of Beeple’s art or a video of a LeBron James dunk is debatable. Any user of the Internet can still pull up the video of James throwing it down and watch it as many times as they want, or download and print out a copy of any digital piece of art. The NFT proves singular ownership, but the high prices these tokens are trading for amid a pandemic-fueled mania might not last.
Someone will likely be left holding the bag when their TopShot millions evaporate overnight, but the concept of NFTs have real long-term value for the business community. Technology leaders IBM and IPwe are teaming up to advance blockchain technology and NFTs into the arena of corporate patents. IBM and IPwe believe that the tokenization of patents and intellectual property will improve liquidity in the patent market, making them easier to buy, sell and trade. Patents will be stored as NFTs on the partners’ blockchain network.
“The IPwe Platform is designed to transform the patent asset class by increasing transparency and promoting engagement, which we believe will encourage innovation,” said IPwe CEO Erich Spangenberg. “The use of NFTs to represent patents will help create completely new ways to interact with IP. This is expected to benefit not only large enterprises that have significant intellectual property, but it will bring new opportunities to small and medium enterprises and even individual IP owners. We believe it will usher in new offerings by financial services firms and corporations to promote the evolution of a new patent asset class.”
Converting patents to NFTs on the blockchain will also benefit companies with large IP libraries. This technology has the potential to simplify how intellectual property is valued. Smaller companies that are still in the early stages of generating revenue will be able to more easily tap equity markets for funding by showing the value of their patents on their balance sheets as digital assets.
The crazed behavior surrounding the cryptocurrency market and the get-rich-quick scheme of the week detracts from the overall legitimacy and potential of blockchain technology. This joint venture by IBM and IPwe is a prime example. If digitization of patents proves successful, the business world could continue looking for more use cases of NFTs that will revolutionize the way companies manage their assets and intellectual property. While this might not catch the attention of Gen Z traders looking to send Dogecoin to the moon, there are dozens of billion-dollar opportunities to revolutionize the business world with blockchain.
