Largest blockchain patent owners in Europe 2021

As of December 31, 2021, nChain owned the second most active blockchain patent families protected in Europe. The London based company owned 169 active patent families and was only surpassed by Ant Group which owned 364 active patent families. The statistic is based on data provided by PatentSight. In the United States, Ant Group was the largest owner of blockchain patents with 519 families as of December 31 2021.

Largest patent owners in blockchain in Europe as of December 2021, by number of filings at the European Patent Office and contracting states of the European Patent Convention

Characteristic	Number of active patent families*
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Release date

June 2022

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Region

Europe

Survey time period

December 31, 2021

Supplementary notes

* A patent family is defined as a group of patent documents all of which have the same set of priorities. I.e., it is a group of patent documents that protect the same invention across authorities.

Included in the data displayed for Europe are the following patent offices: AL, AT, BE, BG, CH, CY, CZ, DE, DK, EE, EP, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, HR, HU, IE, IS, IT, LI, LT, LU, LV, MC, MK, MT, NL, NO, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, SI, SK, SM, TR, and the European Patent Office.

The owner of a patent includes all patents owned by a company and its subsidiaries (by at least 50%) based on comprehensive research on corporate structures, M&A, Spin-offs, company names changes, patent transactions. PatentSight also tracks former names of companies and subsidiaries, ongoing mergers and acquisitions, acquisitions of the past, reassignments, companies that have the same applicant, and transliterations by patent offices.

Technology field definition by Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property – ip-search: " The technology field covers distributed ledger, or shared ledger design, of which one form is Blockchain. Blockchain is a decentralized encryption technology, build by a growing list of linked blocks. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block,a timestamp and transaction data. The technology field also covers various applications of the technology such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptocurrencies as well as Smart Contracts. Due to common wording, a certain amount of closely related encryption technologies, such as block cipher, hashchaining etc. are at least partly included in this field."

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