Will J.P. Morgan Acquire Digital Asset Holdings’ or Winklevoss’ Portfolio?

Surprisingly, J.P. Morgan is a fairly new entrant into the Securities Tokenization space, having only filed two patent applications in the past three years, one in 2018 and one in 2017. However, one of their major competitors, Fidelity, has been very active in the space since 2016. Fidelity has filed at least 15 patent applications since 2016, with two patents being issued as of May 26th, 2020. Because of this, J.P. Morgan is certainly behind in this space.

J.P. Morgan may be trying to make up for lost time by investing in Digital Asset Holdings in December of 2019. Digital Asset Holdings specializes in smart contracts and has filed for 10 patent applications in the last 5 years. These patents, if issued, would be an attractive portfolio for J.P. Morgan to acquire in order to compete with Fidelity in the space. Another option for J.P. Morgan would be to pursue Winklevoss Capital’s patent portfolio because they have the most patents of any player in the space. 13 patents have been issued to Winklevoss Capital in the last three years, more than any other company in the space. The Winklevoss twins are also the co-founders of Gemini, a digital asset exchange company that acquired another blockchain company, Nifty, in November of 2019. This would give J.P. Morgan an established patent base to compete with Fidelity and make up for lost time in the space.

Other companies that could be interested in either Digital Asset Holdings’ or Winklevoss Capital’s portfolio are Goldman Sachs and IBM, both of whom invested in Digital Asset Holdings in 2019 as well and are both new companies in the space. IBM has only one patent application and one patent issued in the last three years, while Goldman Sachs does not appear to be active in the space.

Read more about the open space of fast growing Securities Tokenization sector here.