IBM was given a US patent for a “self-aware” token that’s capable of recording its own data for transactions.

The patent was awarded on January 7. It presents a ledger-based system for payments, a system that makes tracking and tracing crypto transactions easier for governments, businesses and individuals too. It’s designed to record the transactions even when not being used on the payments platform patented by IBM back in 2012. As soon as the token gets back to this platform’s ecosystem later, the data of offline transactions is immediately uploaded.

With the patent, tokens make a complete cycle and reveal all the data about the amounts that have been transacted, the payment location and some information on the token holders. However, the data is not stored in the token itself, but on other devices like phones, laptops and so on.

IBM says that knowing where the tokens come from is very helpful as far as bolstering “trust and viability” in the newly formed community that uses tokens goes, seeing businesses will be able to prove they haven’t been conducting illegal activities, individuals can make sure they haven’t been scammed, whereas regulators can enforce their laws more effectively.

IBM claims that with the new patent, the exchanges between asset classes that are of various forms get to be facilitated. The more cryptocurrencies seem to be developed, the more payments between different asset classes are difficult to enable. This is what the company said about how important it is to record transaction data:

“e-Currencies [could] operate across disparate economic systems, fostering easier participating alongside sovereign currencies and other non-standard currencies.”

In August 2019, IBM also received a patent for a privacy protection blockchain-based web browser. It can be said the company had a certain contribution to the crypto space, seeing it launched the IBM Blockchain Platform back in 2017 and has contributed to the Hyperledger project.

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