Electroneum (ETN) the mobile cryptocurrency project has announced it has been working with a large law firm called Dentons to submit a patent application for instant cryptocurrency transactions and subscription payments.
According to their official statement, the patent “covers all cryptocurrencies and even allows us to provide instant payments or subscriptions in any other cryptocurrency via our system.”
Electroneum has supposedly developed an architecture that will allow it to do two world firsts (which sounds a bit exaggerated given other efforts like Lightning are currently being tested already).
Instant Payments
The instant payments approach that Electroneum is going with is comprised of a centralised application with a decentralised blockchain underneath. The technical details of how instant payments work have not been revealed (to my knowledge).
Subscription Payments
The other part of their patent is subscription payments using cryptocurrency. This will allow a vendor to create a contract which will allow them to prompt a user to setup a subscription, similarly to what Paypal and other online payment services allow.
The CEO Richard Ells said of the announcement:
It’s impossible to overstate how important this patent application is. We’ve known for months that the technology we are developing had the potential to completely change how the world sees cryptocurrency, and in order to protect it we chose Dentons for their reputation in the IP realm. They share our vision for this technology and have been invaluable in helping us file this application. We can’t wait to now begin rolling Electroneum’s technology out in the real world.
It's patent pending, not patent approved
While this announcement from a marketing perspective might sound promising, patent pending means that the patent is under investigation and given Electroneum isn't doing anything overly unique here, there is no guarantee this patent will be approved.
Given other projects (notably Dash) have instant payments already and you have projects like Nano also striving to do the same, ETN isn't in any more unique position than any other project.
One of the biggest threats to Electroneum's pending payment is GRIFT, which submitted their whitepaper before Richard lodged his patent application. In fact, the Grift project was quoted as saying on Reddit in a comment thread about the patent announcement:
We reviewed the white paper with patent lawyers back in October and identified some elements that can be potentially patented, but decided not to patent anything at that point as patents contradict the open source ideology. We are reviewing this issue again as the reality is that some blockchain projects start ignoring the rules, so we don’t want to put GRAFT project and its supporters in a dangerous situation just for the sake of solidarity with the open source community
If you're curious about keeping an eye on the patent, the patent number is: 1805708.3
The question remains: do we really want patents in cryptocurrency? Given open source underpins the very core of cryptocurrency from Bitcoin through to Dogecoin, do we want companies patenting technology related to crypto instead of sharing it?