Does Veritaseum Own All of DeFi?

By Tomadachi | Tomadachi | 10 Dec 2021

Readers of Publish0x will not need telling that the last few weeks have been brutal for digital currencies and assets. The markets are a sea of red with just a few short-lived sprouts of green to break the narrative of fear. One of those in the green was Veritaseum (VERI).

Two years ago, VERI token holders were left dumbfounded when the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) appeared to sign the death sentence for the project when they levied millions of dollars in penalties and seized 98% of the 100 million token supply.

That 2% of circulating tokens still left in public hands have seen rapid growth over the last week.

Image: CoinGecko

The spike in price came when it was announced that the founder of Veritaseum, Reggie Middleton, was granted a US patent relating to DeFi.

A similar patent was already granted to Middleton by the authorities in Japan.

So Veritaseum now own DeFi related patents in the largest and third largest economies in the world.

Middleton's own website, which has a long commented on the worldwide state of macro economics - BoomBustBlog - was in no doubt about the importance of the patents and published the following headline:

Image: BoomBustBlog

According to his article, Middleton believes that:

"In the globally leading economies, where patents have been attained, as well as those entities that operate using the invention with and through them, it is Mr. Middleton’s opinion that patent protection now exists over:

devices used to transfer conditional value through distributed ledgers, i.e., blockchains (such as certain uses of the ubiquitous virtual machine, or VM)
systems used to transfer conditional value through distributed ledgers, i.e., sidechain implementations to platforms such as Bitcoin and similar scaling improvements to Ethereum (which the invention predates) and other blockchains; and
methods used to transfer conditional value through distributed ledgers, such as certain implementations of On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), swaps and lending facilities, certain asset-backed and stable tokens, letters of credit and DLT insurance schemes."

Twitter Opinions

Twitter was relatively quiet on the subject but a few ventured to put forth their opinions...

Here is the list in full for those who are Twitter averse...

There are some big names there but previous comments from Middleton have suggested others, including Ripple and major banks are also likely infringing on the patents.