South Korea leads in blockchain patent-granting rate

A new report indicates that in terms of the number of patents involving blockchain being granted, South Korea has the highest rate in the world. It far surpasses the country in second place; Japan.

The ranking was done by IAM, a platform for intellectual property business media. According to its findings, South Korea has a 54 percent rate of blockchain patents being granted. Meanwhile, Japan is only at a measly 17 percent with the U.S. following closely behind at 16 percent. As for why this is the case, the report suggests it has to do with the system of granting patents in the respective countries.

“This could be because many of the patent publications in these countries have B1 kind code, where no previously published pre-grant publications exist. Therefore, many patents filed in Korea, Japan and the US in this dataset were already granted patents when published,” the report reads.

As for the matter of China’s poor performance at a measly two percent, this is being attributed to the fact that patents are first published before they are examined in the country. This is why most of the inventions that were submitted for patent-granting have yet to receive it.

“At present, the vast majority of invention patents are still in the examination stage and few have been granted,” the report reads.

However, the rate at which blockchain patents are granted does not tell the complete story. On the matter of actual innovations involving the distributed ledger technology, China and the US lead the pack, Cointelegraph reports. Together, they actually make up 84 percent of the developments in the nascent industry.

Patent filings for blockchain have also outstripped the rate at which patents for other technologies are being filed. This shows significant interest in the technology despite reports of investments in blockchain seeing a huge reduction for this year.