Blockchain, best known for the crypto-currency Bitcoin and Ethereum or fintech, is being used today to track the progress of goods in a supply chain, a domain of increasing interest to many Intellectual Property (IP) sectors. These include the pharmaceutical, automotive, luxury and consumer goods industries, art in all its forms, where the traceability of goods is important and counterfeit and grey goods need to be marked out. Blockchain is attractive because of its potential uses, ranging from crypto-currency, transaction and contractual information to data files, photos, videos and design documents and newer systems keep getting devised every day.
Simply put, blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology which creates a secure, transparent record of every transaction, and reports the transaction to everyone on the blockchain platform. For example, if there is somebody who has authored a book, the blockchain will not store the actual book, but would record it as an encryp