Walmart is the company with the largest revenue in the world, with $480 billion in sales. The American retail giant is now exploring blockchain options for the safe storage of payment data and other sensitive information. Predictably, they are not seeking to establish a permissionless blockchain such as Bitcoin, but rather a permissioned blockchain (although they do not say this explicitly), which means that Walmart would have the exclusive right to choose who can function as a node on the network.

The first patent filed by Walmart describes a vendor payment sharing system, which would “automatically process payment for a total amount due for the products and services related to obtaining and delivering the products; automatically dividing the payment between parties that provided services related to obtaining and delivering the products; and encrypt the payment and the division of the payment with a blockchain.”

The second patent employs blockchain technology to protect the payment data in a similar manner, but is focused on online shopping.

Walmart is not the only giant company that is looking to secure intellectual property in the blockchain space – PayPal, for example, has filed a patent for a cryptocurrency system.

While it is pretty much a certainty that companies such as Walmart and PayPal won’t be interested in the values of decentralization and transparency that originally played a key part in the creation of cryptocurrency and blockchain by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2018, interest from these giants of business definitely offers even more evidence that there’s more than just hype to blockchain technology.