You know what keeps growing? Blockchain use cases. After finance, trade, supply chain and automobiles now the telecom industry is targeting blockchain. In fact, the American telecom giant Verizon has been granted a patent that allows virtual SIMs to be put over a blockchain.

Verizon’s patent explains how virtual SIMs (or vSIMs) can be secured by encryption of blockchain technology. A device on Verizon’s network needs to create a user account for storing various vSIMs and the services associated with them. Then the network device can create a blockchain record of those details, and a vSIM certificate containing the IMSI number of subscriber can be generated. That certificate can be used on the client’s mobile device as a SIM card.

What’s The Use of Blockchain?

The use of blockchain in this case, as you can see, is to securely keep a record of user account and SIM details in such a manner that they can’t be altered later to create a clone of the vSIM.

Verizon’s patent calls the blockchain a “vSIM blockchain”, and nodes participating in it will keep the records of all vSIMs in a hash tree structure for the purpose of efficiency.

The vSIMs created by this system can be assigned to any number of devices as long as those devices are linked to the same user account to which the vSIM was issued.

Moreover, one user can also temporarily transfer his vSIM to another user just like a physical SIM card. Clearly, this is the future of SIM cards. vSIMs were already emerging as a popular technology, and now with the power of blockchain they can become even more reliable than physical SIM cards.

It’s also worth noting that this is not Verizon’s first encounter with blockchain. Previously they’ve also invested in $15 million funding round of Filament, which is a startup developing blockchain hardware for IoT.