In the last blog post, we defined what blockchain technology is and addressed the idea of digital scarcity. In this blog post, as the title suggests, we will be exploring blockchain based use cases under the headings – Intellectual Property, Representative Documents, Financial Assets and Intangibles.

Intellectual Property
Intellectual Property (IP) is defined as a creation of the mind – it can include things like inventions and literary or artistic works. Some specific and more common examples of IP could include books, music & visual content.
Now, its important to remember to think about blockchain technology as a giant ledger that is publicly kept; and what do we do with ledgers? Simply put, we record things in them; and these things could include IP. If you think about it – blockchain technology is perfect for securely protecting the authorship of original works, as it is immutable (the records cannot change), it is transparent (the contents of the blockchain are publicly viewable) and it establishes provenance (showcases the earliest known history of something – be it the creation of the works or the chronicle of ownership). These properties in tandem with the ability to transact on the blockchain, creates the perfect storm to not only safely store and transfer IP but to be able to monetize same and in some cases enforce a royalty – which is not only today’s reality of how blockchain is used but it is a creator’s dream.

Representative Documents
Representative documents can be defined as a piece of written matter that provides information or evidence that can serve as an official record. Think property deeds, school diplomas and certificates.
The problem that these kinds of documents often face – especially in low trust environments, is the question of “legitimacy”. In other words, people or entities will often ask themselves, how can I verify that this is in fact authentic? Well to answer that question, you would need to know if the file really came from the appropriate issuer. Blockchain via its innate properties allows for traceability – so if there is a question over a document’s integrity, you can find who the original issuer was and feel comfortable about its origins. This minimizes and if paired with digital identification technologies, eliminates fraud – an administrators dream, which is also something that blockchain is being used for as at today.

Financial Assets
A financial asset is a non-physical resource wherein its value is derived from a contractual claim like a stock or bond. A contractual claim for a stock – for example, is that it represents ownership in a company and with said ownership comes defined rights.
As you could well imagine – there is a need for a “ledger” of sorts to keep record of who owns what and when. And for it to be paired with some form or forms of legal documentation to verify what rights are attached to what is owned. What if I told you that programmable blockchains can manage from end to end all the needs of issuing, managing and leveraging financial assets – i.e. everything from record keeping, to contractual representations, to liquid environments that can facilitate trade as well as borrowing and lending 24/7? And just like the other two use cases, this is a reality of what blockchain is capable of as at today – a trader’s dream.

Intangibles
The word intangible means – incapable of being touched, which is truthfully something that can be said of all the other use cases discussed. But for the purposes of the blog and to capture novel use cases that don’t exactly fit in the other categories, this term was borrowed and coined to be a distant relative of “IP” – to represent concepts like ownership over shared ideas and in game assets.
Let’s take in-game items as an example to demonstrate the value of the use case. At present, gamers though they may buy “skins” and other items to improve their game play or to represent themselves in a way that they’d like, to others, they don’t truly own what it is they purchased; in that, the gaming studio can strip them of the asset, they can’t “carry it with them” to use the items in other ecosystems nor is there a means to sell same on an open marketplace. Blockchain enables a shift, wherein gamers can own their items and sell them if they so desire, as “tokenisation” has brought liquidity into environments that were formally illiquid. This is in large part enabled by this notion of “ownership” managed by distributed ledgers. And while this is admittedly not every gamer’s dream, there are clearly segments of gamers and gaming studios who appreciate this concept and are making use of same as at today!

So you see, blockchain technology has many different applications. To make these examples even more real, in the next four blogs, we will discuss actual examples of creatives and companies who use the technology in the ways we described today – starting with intellectual property.