Unlocking Unprecedented Value with IPwe
Matt Coolidge
SVP of Global Communications
In January, Casper Labs announced one of the largest blockchain deployments on any chain to date, minting millions of patents as NFTs on Casper Blockchain. Congratulations to our partners at IPwe for pioneering one of the most impactful enterprise blockchain use cases to date.
Intellectual property (IP) is a central concern for nearly every major company worldwide. Intangible assets alone represent 90% of the S&P 500’s value equating to over $21 trillion in market value.[1] Despite intellectual property (IP) representing the large majority of intangible assets and the annual sales and licensing of patents estimated at $180 billion a year, just 2% to 5% of patents are ever sold or licensed, signaling a massive opportunity for companies to generate revenue.[23] IPwe’s mission is to provide these companies, that are not pursuing value realization opportunities, with real time insights and analytics about their IP so they can fully unlock their IP’s value.
Most companies don’t know the value of their IP – an especially pressing concern in uncertain economic times, when businesses are being pushed to extract ever more value in increasingly creative ways. Only 5% of patents transact, because their underlying data has traditionally been highly siloed and difficult to parse.[4] Blockchain technology offers a novel solution for recouping this lost value by making important, verified information about patents more accessible and consolidated.
Businesses worldwide are increasingly reaping the benefits of blockchain-powered IP management, with tokenization of real world assets projected to become a $16 trillion industry by 2030.[5] Blockchain technology allows disparate patent data to be streamlined into a single wrapper without compromising on security, unlocking much more efficient, transparent data management of a company's most valuable assets. From licensing history to past prosecution, IPwe, with the support of Casper Labs, is helping enterprises navigate the complicated web of a patent’s journey, providing critical financial metrics that can unlock considerable new opportunities for a business.
IPwe is using Casper’s CEP-78 NFT standard, which offers the market’s most secure and flexible approach to managing NFTs in enterprise environments. It allows organizations like IPwe to seamlessly and securely migrate data between public, private and hybrid networks. IPwe is taking a hybrid approach, powered by the permissioned, distributed ledger technologies of open source Hyperledger Fabric and the public Casper Blockchain, allowing organizations to control who has access to the data stored about each patent while also realizing the economic efficiencies of public chain deployments.
CEP-78 is the first NFT standard to offer more granular, account-based access and permissioning while also allowing organizations to upgrade NFT code even after it’s been deployed, to meet changing business requirements, introduce new features and/or fix bugs. When it comes to IP, this level of flexibility is essential to keep up-to-date with regulations, legal processes and transaction history.
As a leader in the digitization of IP, IPwe is providing its customers with a seamless and interoperable platform to manage critical assets. IPwe's Smart Intangible Asset Management (SIAM) provides automated IP portfolio analyses that enable companies to quantify and track the financial performance of their assets and benchmark their portfolios against their peers and competitors for informed, data driven decision making. This deployment will be a major milestone for IP's digital transformation, and it will arrive at a critical time for organizations. IPwe and Casper Labs are leading the way in realizing the full potential of IP by creating the most transparent, secure and efficient way of managing ownership data the world has ever seen. The Casper blockchain will play a vital role in the road ahead by housing this highly sensitive data, driving growth for enterprises, governments and startups through the power of the blockchain.
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelwolfson/2019/06/20/ibm-2-0-enterprise-blockchain-tracks-five-thousand-patents-across-50m-platform/?sh=71f536553f8c
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/06/18/13633/?sh=47354e436f1c
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/06/18/13633/?sh=23b444d86f1c
[5] https://web-assets.bcg.com/1e/a2/5b5f2b7e42dfad2cb3113a291222/on-chain-asset-tokenization.pdf
