SVET Reports
Walmart Submitted A Patent Application For Stable-Coins
On August 1 the "System and method for digital currency via blockchain users" application assigned by "Walmart Apollo, LLC, Bentonville, AR" (WMT's headquarter address) was published on the US patent and trademark office site.
Its "Abstract" section contains the following: "A method include: generating one digital currency unit by tying the one digital currency unit to a regular currency; storing information of the one digital currency unit into a block of a blockchain; buying or paying the one digital currency unit; determining whether restrictions are applied to the one digital currency unit by referring to one or more documents associated with the one digital currency; recording the determination in a block of the blockchain; ... "
Basically, this 57-years retail brontosaurus, which runs more than 11 thousands stores across the planet with yearly aggregated revenue exceeding half-a- trillion dollars, now also claims that it has legal rights to exclude all of us from making stable-coins.
Moreover, those guys do not want to limit themselves by only mere "digital" realm they also claim their rights on all associated hard-ware (other saying, our computers): "A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having instructions stored which, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform operations comprising: generating one digital currency unit by tying the one digital currency unit to a regular currency".
Back in June one of the posts in this group mentioned UK legal firm "Withers & Rogers" reporting that "total number of (DLT) patents applications reached 4 thousands in 2018". Since the Venetian patent statute was passed by doges in the mid-XV century, granting a legal protection to authors of "any new and ingenious device, not previously made", the existence of unbreachable "patent laws" have been widely recognized as the cornerstone of capitalism. Looks like today patents are only good as weapons of mass destruction to use by patent trolls against SME. Well, 'sic transit gloria mundi'.