Bank Of America To File For 20 More Blockchain-Related Patents

According to latest reports, Bank of America Corp is going to file for 20 patents related to the blockchain technology to the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO) later this month, in addition to 15 other patents that it currently holds, a spokesperson told CNBC.

"Blockchain's very intriguing and for us it's a balance between not wanting to be Neanderthal but not wanting to put something out in a commercial application where the commercial application is still very unclear as a technologist, the technology is fascinating," Catherine Bessant, the chief operations and technology office at Bank of America, said during a CNBC event at Davos.

The USPTO published 10 patent applications last month that were filed by Bank of America in June 2014, CoinDesk reported. It includes:

• Cryptocurrency Offline Vault Storage System
• Cryptocurrency Transformation System
• Cryptocurrency Transaction Validation System
• Cryptocurrency Risk Detection System
• Cryptocurrency Electronic Payment System
• Cryptocurrency Suspicious User Alert System
• Cryptocurrency Aggregation System
• Cryptocurrency Online Vault Storage System
• Cryptocurrency Transaction Payment System
• Cryptocurrency Real-Time Conversion System

"And we have tried to stay on the forefront, I think we have somewhere around 15 patents, most people would be surprised at Bank of America with patents in the blockchain or cryptocurrency space. (It's) very important in the intellectual property world to reserve our spot even before we know what the commercial application might be”, Bessant added.

Moreover, Bank of America is also one of the 42 collaborating member banks of the R3-led blockchain consortium. Recently, eleven member banks of the consortium successfully completed their first experiment, coordinated by R3 CEV using Ethereum, hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft’s Azure.