Alibaba and Ant Financial lead the ranking for blockchain patent applications, filing 2344 claims in total over the past two years.
The data, collated by patent database IncoPat, shows that Alibaba has filed patent applications via several corporate entities, including Alibaba Group and Alipay. The majority of Alibaba's blockchain patent applications in 2019 were filed by the blockchain team at Ant Financial, focusing on commercial use cases, such as payment, finance, insurance and security.
Earlier this month, Ant Financial opened up its proprietary blockchain platform to small businesses and developers to help in the creation of multi-user trust-based digital applications.
Alibaba's patent splurge is more than double the number of applications filed by the next Chinese giant on the list, TenCent, which is majoring on content creation and social media engagement.
Most of the top 100 companies in the 2019 Global Blockchain Enterprise Patent Rankings hail from nine countries and regions, with entities from China, the US and Japan accounting for 60, 22 and 6 percent of the list respectively.