Every so often patents appear in a sector that are easy to miss because they aren’t assigned to a large company or to a start-up that has been receiving much press. These patents are even more often ignored if they are assigned to a company that doesn’t seem to exist at all. That may be the case with an application assigned in late April 2021 to 2218716 Alberta Ltd. However, whenever a company name looks more like a street address, then you know something is going on. The application is directed to a platform for trading tokens backed by royalties on things such as mineral and gas rights, and music and film copyrights. Sounds like a neat idea, but who is actually doing it?

As you might expect, no one is doing business as 2218716 Alberta Ltd., but this sort of name isn’t quite as unusual as you might expect. Canada allows for the registration of numbered corporations, which are slightly cheaper to form than named corporations, but more importantly allow for anonymity, which is useful in forming holding companies. Unfortunately for them, patents require inventors’ names. The inventors listed on the application are Mike Gee, James Graham, Barry Kreiser, and Tony Loria. The first three names appear to be executives for GuildOne, a company dedicated to, you guessed it, blockchain transactions of oil and gas royalties. However, GuildOne has previously filed a different application under its own name, so why the change? The answer appears to lie with the fourth inventor: Tony Loria.

Tony Loria appears to be a vice chairman of Eight Capital, a Canadian investment dealer. Knowing that Loria works for a different company brings into focus a likely reason for the creation of 2218716: a holding company ensuring that both Eight Capital and GuildOne have rights. This is further evidenced by the fact that public records show 2218716 as forming on September 23, 2019, less than one month before the provisional application for this application was filed. Another interesting point is that some records show the company’s incorporation address as being 700 9th Avenue, Suite 3000, which would correspond to the law firm handling this particular patent: Miller Thompson. However, the assignment document from the inventors to 2218716 states that the address is 335 8th Avenue, Suite 2110, which corresponds to Eight Capital’s Calgary office. Might this suggest that Eight Capital has greater leverage in this relationship? Regardless, the relationship between Tony Loria and the GuildOne team appears to suggest that Eight Capital might be a willing financier for GuildOne’s future efforts and that GuildOne is a company to watch.

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