According to documents published by the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) on August 30, Walmart applied for a patent for “In-Field Authenticating of Autonomous Robots” back in January of this year.

In an attempt to compete with Amazon, arguably their largest competitor, Walmart will use these robot troops to make deliveries. The ongoing battle between Amazon and Walmart is centralized around e-commerce. Amazon’s creation of the new online retail model has shaped the way consumers shop and forever changed our expectations of “fast, convenient, on-time delivery.” With the introduction of Amazon Prime and 1-Day Shipping, Walmart risks losing customers to their rival.

In an effort to stay competitive and profitable, Walmart plans to utilize robots to handle the delivery of a package throughout different legs of the supply chain, using wireless signals to communicate and authenticate the identity of one another. Since this system would likely be a target for hackers, Walmart will likely utilize distributed ledger technology which will help protect it against prospective wrongdoing.

The author of the patent application, John O’Brien, states, “In some embodiments of described above, blockchain technology may be utilized to record authentication signals and identification information to facilitate or resulting from in-field authentication between autonomous electronic devices. One or more of the autonomous electronic devices described herein may comprise a node in a distributed blockchain system storing a copy of the blockchain record. Updates to the blockchain may comprise authentication signals or identification information, and one or more nodes on the system may be configured to incorporate one or more updates into blocks to add to the distributed database.”

This isn’t the first time Walmart has expressed an interest in blockchain. In July of this year, Walmart was awarded a patent detailing an invention focused on the delivery and scheduling of packages. They also filed for a different patent in 2017 which uses blockchain technology to track delivery drones as they transmit packages from physical stores to customers.