Inventors and small businesses must ensure their intellectual property isn’t stolen by larger companies. Creating currencies might be the solution.

“Effectively, we have a do-it-yourself search tool,” said John Wise, founder of Loci. “It’s called InnVenn. It’s really simple to use, you can buy it right through your law firm, and it’s protected by attorney-client privilege.”

InnVenn allows inventors to search and make sure their idea or creation is new without risking it being stolen. If it’s a new idea, the inventor can claim that space in InnVenn. The search tool allows inventors to avoid long, expensive patent examinations and speed up research and development.

“What they can actually do with that, though, is if they think or feel that they can’t really produce or execute on that product, they can actually sell it and stake their claim to that invention over our blockchain,” he told What’s Working in Washington.

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This is where the currency aspect comes in. While it is a kind of digital currency, “this is not like a programmatic mining for Bitcoin or Etherium… What you can actually do is, intellectual thought itself, having the ideas, because they are backing a cryptocurrency, you can mine your own currency by coming up with new ideas,” said Wise.

Cryptocurrencies such as InnVenn illustrate that, in the future, money might not be minted and distributed by governments at all, Wise says, noting that he would not be surprised if a globalized currency became a reality in the next five years.

Wise compares the timeline of cryptocurrencies to the development of the internet over time. While Bitcoin in 2009 is akin to Internet 1.0, “This is 3.0,” he said.

“This region, the D.C. region in particular, is very, very well positioned for this. If we’d just wake up,” said Wise.

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