Benzinga | Nov 9, 2021 12:15PM EST

WISeKey Files Patent Application For Persistent And Authenticatable NFTs

WISeKey International Holding Ltd. ("WISeKey") (NASDAQ:WKEY, SIX: WIHN))))), a leading global cybersecurity, IoT, and AI company, today announced that it has filed a patent application that ensures the provenance, authenticity, persistence, and longterm value of NFTs that are minted on Blockchains using this method. During the minting process, this method allows to ensure that the NFT is not corrupted, incomplete, or ambiguous.

In general, there is a high confidence in the ability of a Blockchain to preserve and store the public key and digital signature information of the NFT along with any subsequent transaction data over long and very long periods of time. However, a Blockchain cannot preserve information that the NFT does not itself include. Such as disclosed in the patent application, it is the information in a persistent offchain storage that establishes the value and that needs to be authenticated and secured.

NFTs that are not created by this method will not contain enough information to ensure that the minter of the NFT was the originator or possessor of the object at the time of minting or had authority to mint the NFT. Without identifying and establishing the rights of the minter, the long-term value of the NFT is diminished.

The information associated with an NFT can easily degrade over long periods of time. For example, over several decades or even over centuries the owner of an NFT, their descendants, and others may find it difficult to discern whether an NFT is authentic or what object the NFT is associated with, or the location where the object itself is located. There is no assurance that the NFT itself will preserve its ability to authenticate the associated object or that its association with the object will be preserved.

In order to solve these technical problems, the methods protected by the patent application define the structure, composition and minting process of an authenticatable and persistent NFT to establish and maintain long-term value as well as corresponding systems implementing these methods.

Carlos Moreira, WISeKey's CEO pointed out, "This is an important patent application both for WISeKey as a company and for the NFT ecosystem in general. As this patent application's methods and systems are adopted, the NFT marketplace will continue to gain acceptance and legitimacy."