Craig Wright, an Australian entrepreneur that earlier claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, has been sending dozens of blockchain related patent applications to the British Office of Intellectual Property.

However, the businessman’s name is not directly mentioned on the organisation’s list. It is the Antigua-registered company EITC Holdings Ltd that is present as the applicant in the journal. Two of the company’s directors are Wright’s associates, reports Reuters.

More than 50 patent applications have been made from February up to the present day, and the financier is not going to stop: all in all, over 400 applications are on the list presented by a person or persons close to EITC Holdings. The informants notably refused to disclose their identity, because they were not authorised to speak to the media.

All the applications are related to the industry of blockchains/distributed ledgers. That includes “methods and systems for efficient transfer of entities on a peer-to-peer distributed ledger”, “a method and system for controlling the performance of a contract using a distributed hash table and a peer to peer distributed ledger”, “operating system for blockchain IOT devices”, “implementing logic gate functionality using a blockchain” and “payment and distribution of digital content”.

The details of the applications are not disclosed. Given the growing popularity of blockchain-based applications, however, the granting of some of these patents might bring the applicant a fortune. Journalist and novelist Andrew O’Hagan, who has recently published a large essay about Wright titled “The Satoshi Affair” and has spent some time with him, says the total worth of the patents the entrepreneur’s associates are trying to claim is more than $1 billion. Wright himself refused to give any comments on the story.

Craig Wright, who in December 2015 was first suggested to be the person behind the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, gained notoriety in May 2016 when he failed to actually prove his claim that he was the creator of bitcoin. The incident undermined the businessman’s reputation in the community. After that, he effectively disappeared from the public eye. Some people argue, although blockchain related patent applications are being made all the time (including attempts to patent the term “bitcoin”), the idea of patenting is not consistent with the free spirit of the distributed ledger technology.

Andrew Levich