Throughout the history of the markets there’s been a large segment of investors who have valued and benefited from companies that held patent portfolios. It was a sign of technical execution and achievement defined by intellectual property (IP) which might be purchased for a lot of money by a another party in the future. These aspects would translate to investors as the price or valuation of the company would rise.

It’s very rare for newly minted cryptocurrency teams to have already executed on a patent or two. It’s a fantastic sign of value and validation. However, with early projects in the cryptocurrency area more must be considered than a pending patent or a patent that’s been granted. To reiterate points I’ve mentioned in the past to those in my fund that engage in due diligence, Here they are again. These are things to consider that when combined with a patent portfolio can result in explosive gains for your cryptocurrency portfolio. They are:

Team

How long have the team members known one another? Have they worked together in the past? If so, for what period of time and through what kinds of circumstances?

Strategy

Do they have a well thought out strategy? Is their strategy too similar to that of their competitors. Do they know who their competitors are?

Technology

Is their technology unique or hard to duplicate? Is their approach scalable? Do they have any ‘technical debt’?

Product-to-Market fit

Since most early cryptocurrency groups are operating with a whitepaper alone, you’ll most likely have to do your own product-to-market fit for them. If they have a working product, ask them to see any customer feedback they can share.

Track Record of Execution

Does the team or any of its members have a track record that shows they’ve accomplished or executed anything to completion in the past? If so, how was it received? What was the projects impact, level of innovation and creativity?

They don’t have to hit all of these points spot-on at 100% . However, one of the most important points that acts as a common thread across all of these points is whether or not the team can pull together and execute on a patent portfolio. It’s a different story if you single individual and you have an idea for a better mouse trap. When you’re a team or startup it takes all hands on deck including attorneys and investors who typically help with filing costs for various applications in different countries.

All things considered, these are the teams that are either executing on their patent portfolios with pending patents or patents that have already been awarded. Taking a closer look at teams with validated intellectual property may pay off nicely for today’s cryptocurrency investors:

DisLedger’s [link] Distributed Concurrence Ledgers (patent pending) an architecture for distributed ledgers tailored for financial institutions dealing in capital markets and payments.

They claim with their tagline that DisLedger is incredibly fast and completely private as an architecture for enterprise distributed ledgers. I can see the value that enterprises would need in privacy. One of their key characteristics is that they support some of the worlds largest companies based offering their solution in a scalable way.

DisLedger is a distributed concurrence ledger that provides more secure, faster and more scalable transaction processing than consensus blockchain systems. From their whitepaper: “The same benefits of 2 Copyright 2017 DisLedger Ltd. immutable records, and regulatory transparency are provided, however the transactions are processed only by the actual counterparties involved and not by a consensus of the crowd.

Currently many organizations use clearinghouses or other services to assist in processing transactions but in these cases the outside parties are always trusted, impartial, and independent. Consensus based blockchains eliminate these impartial organizations and instead rely on a network of peers to validate and process transactions. One would expect the members of the blockchain network would all be direct competitors within an industry or asset class. An organization participating in a blockchain is forced to rely completely on its competitors to process its transactions in good faith without any manipulation, in order without frontrunning, and immediately without any delay. When transactions of such high values in such competitive industries are at stake, placing all of one’s business deals in the hands of your competitors is unnecessarily risky.

In a distributed concurrence ledger the transaction processing is handled privately between only the actual counterparties to the transaction which eliminates any reliance on competitors.”

They also note: “The Blockchain is best suited for provenance type systems (land title, artwork, etc.) where providing visibility is a main goal and the long latency of transaction processing is not important. DisLedger is tailored for high speed, transactional systems (capital markets settlement and payments processing) where privacy is important and transaction speed is critical.”

DisLeger is listed and trading today with the symbol DCL.

The Vectorspace [link] AI platform enables ‘Smart Basket’ (token baskets for traders, funds, ETFs) generation based on user-selected trends that exist in search, social media and news. Their ‘Smart Baskets’ on the ability for these baskets to determine for themselves whether or not to include additional cryptocurrencies or components from related baskets that may increase overall returns. Baskets that interact this way with one another will conduct these kinds of transactions between one another using the Vectorspace utility token, VXV which is also required to dynamically generate baskets along with their AI pipelines which are powered by their VXV wallet-enabled API and Data Provenance Pipeline (DPP) hash:

Vectorspace looks to be designed to help you increase your profits with other cryptocurriences by reducing risk and maximizing your gains. Their focus is on “Advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) & Sentiment Analysis for Smart Cryptocurrency Basket Trading” and they have live products any crypto trader can use today. Their site updates every few minutes powered by their algorithms. It looks like they’re at the early stages of their 2nd private round but farther along in terms of their product offerings that have been released to the public in addition to their patents referenced on their site in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Google

Vectorspace is a already trading on IDEX with the symbol VXV located here so it might be possible to position in early before major listings occur.

Athelas [link] has patent pending automated insurance technology for the health case sector. They state they are creating a new health insurance company that solves America’s health insurance cost problem.

According to Athelas, America has a $581 billion per year problem with billing and insurance related administrative costs. Their solution eliminates the need to spend most of that money. They seek to cut premiums by 40% and deductibles by 18% while offering high quality health insurance.

According to their whitepaper: “Athelas is the first automated, software based, health insurance company, and the first entity to provide a concrete solution to solve the problem of high and quickly growing health insurance premiums in the United States. Although we will still have human assistance and supervision, our goal is to reduce insurance premiums by 40% by disrupting and eliminating to the greatest extent possible, the approximately $581 billion (see analysis section) per year unnecessary cost of health insurance billing and insurance administration to America while also reducing fraud and abuse (target savings $90 billion) in the health care industry. This will be done by creating a disruptor health insurance company, simplifying insurance processes, then automating them using our patent pending anti-fraud and abuse business methods/software, separate decentralized autonomous organization using smart contracts, private Ethereum blockchain, distributed cloud storage, and blockchain based payments. Our ultimate goal is to completely automate health insurance and become a fully automated artificial intelligence technology company. We will also create of a social network to enhance the project and could generate advertising revenue to further reduce insurance costs.”

Athelas is a post-ICO company so again, I’d look out for when they list on their first exchange.

Conclusion

Patents are important. Patent portfolios are an asset and proof of validated technical intellectual property. When applied to efforts in cryptocurrency this cannot inhibit the growth of the cryptocurrency community in any way. When balanced this way, a team with a patent portfolio as an asset can translate nicely to gains in an investors cryptocurrency portfolio. Bottom line!