The entire team at GNY is thrilled to introduce our non-executive chairman, Peter Davies. Peter Davies is a barrister who has held senior legal positions in a number of technology companies, including Microsoft, IBM and Apple Computers. During his 30+ years of working in technology law and for some of the most impactful tech companies in the world, Peter has developed a refined perspective on the role of patents in emerging tech environments. It is precisely this expertise that made us so excited to welcome him to our team as Chairman of the Board. We hope to be introducing Peter to the blockchain community more thoroughly in the coming months, but for now we wanted to let him introduce himself in his own words.





Prior to serving as Chairman of the Board for GNY, Peter was European Legal Director for Apple and Microsoft

"I’m incredibly excited to join GNY.IO as non-executive chairman of its board of directors. I’ve held senior legal positions in some of the biggest tech businesses on the planet and top executives in each of these giants would often urge their teams to retain the energy, quick reactions and hunger for results of a start-up company. Well, now I really know what that means!





I was very interested to read about the Internet Archive’s Decentralised Web Summit that took place last month in San Francisco. At events like these, we’re starting to see some radical re-imagining of the online world, so that innovation in AI and blockchain applications is speeding up at the same time as social pressure is growing to use the huge potential of these technologies in responsible ways. We need to keep this in mind even as we grasp the fantastic opportunities that are out there.





Any IP lawyer will tell you that tracing patterns in patent applications is a pretty good way of identifying future directions in tech innovation. A couple of numbers tell the story: Bloomberg Law data reported on cointelegraph.com shows that nearly 700 blockchain-related patent applications were published in the US between January 2011 and April 30 of this year, with 70 patents on blockchain technology granted during that time. The Financial Times cites World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) data revealing that China filed 225 blockchain patents in 2017 alone, almost half of all the 406 blockchain-related patent applications made around the world that year according to the WIPO database.





These numbers might look intimidating but in fact they’re extremely encouraging. This is where inventive, creative energy is now being directed. This is where the opportunities are to be found. So energy, quick reactions and hunger for results are still clearly what it’s all about. That was true when I joined my first tech company employer in 1988 and so far as I can see that much at least hasn’t changed. "