The European Patent Office granted three new patents related to Blockchain to the company nChain, built from the research of its CTO, the self-proclaimed creator of Bitcoin, Craig Wright. The company of the self-styled Satoshi Nakamoto this time has set his sights on the protection of digital rights, using the blockchain of bitcoin cash.

According to an official statement released by the company on July 11, the three patents are methods to enforce the demands of digital rights through the use of blockchain technology provided by Bitcoin Cash.

But what are these patents about? Under patent number EP3295349, nChain has patented a method and system for verifying the integrity of a digital asset. For this, they use a Bitcoin Cash transaction, which includes additional metadata to reference the digital asset. An entry into an external Distributed Hash Table (DHT) where the digital asset signatures, plus the signatures on the DHT and the signature on the Blockchain transaction itself, must be aligned to demonstrate the integrity of the asset.

The patent EP3295362 proposes a method and system to verify the ownership of a digital asset and is based on the same approach of EP3295349, adding "another set of cryptographic operations" to validate the current ownership of the digital asset. Finally, patent EP3295350, described by the company as "a logical extension" of the previous patent.

According to the statement, the company had already signed similar patents . In fact, according to the document, these latest patents follow those already signed: "on April 11, 2018 (for a register and automated management method for smart blockchain contracts), and on June 20, 2018 (for a deterministic generation of keys to improve digital security) ".

In addition, the CEO of nChain Group, Jimmy Nguyen, explained that BCH's blockchain is the one with the best characteristics of the ecosystem, hence nChain has decided to patent its technology using this chain, adding that they are "selecting key partners" to develop use cases that may benefit the users of this cryptocurrency.

The company had worked closely with another project derived from a Bitcoin bifurcation, Bitcoin Unlimited. Thus, in August, members of both teams met to explore the scope of the proposed scalability of the Bitcoin network through improvements in the Unlimited client software. The integration of both technologies was done to overcome the vulnerability problems of Bitcoin Unlimited. In addition, in October, together with members of the University of British Columbia, they mined a block of 1 GB capacity in the global GigaBlock Tesnet network.