Today IBM declared that it topped the 2019 list of U.S. patent receivers for a record 27th consecutive year. Additionally, it was given the most blockchain patents. The wonder is that blockchain did not arrive on the top ten list of growth sections at the U.S. patent office, according to a report from IFI Claims.

IBM said its grants involved various patents linked to blockchain network security. It called one of the applications as “resisting ‘replay attacks,’ where an attacker copies and applies signature information from one transaction on a blockchain to later perform other transactions on the blockchain that are not authorized.”

Other categories where IBM outdid involved AI, quantum, and security patents.

However, IFI Claims’ researchers recognized ten high growth patent areas, and blockchain didn’t get an allusion. That could be in part because the measures are over five years, and much of blockchain’s importance has been in the last two or three years.

This doesn’t indicate the growth was slow, and we consider blockchain is spread over various patent classifications. For instance, patents for applications associated with cryptography encountered 21.53% compound annual growth (CAGR) over five years. Business processing utilizing cryptography had a five-year CAGR of 36.28%.

But that rate is low related to the growth leader – hybrid flowering plants, which came in with a five-year CAGR of 117%. When it gets to computers, the highest growth relates to biological models (73.18%), which also had notable absolute numbers. Machine learning was up 52.1%, AI (computer systems based on mathematical models) grew 43.62%, and Quantum computing patents increased by 38.11% over five years.

In terms of the most active companies to obtain patents across all categories, IBM was followed by Samsung, Canon, Microsoft, and Intel. The rest of the top ten was made up of LG, Ford, Apple, Amazon, and Huawei.

Presently China’s CAICT issued its analysis of global blockchain patents, in which IBM came in at number four. The CAICT research included patent applications as opposed to IFI Claims’ publication, which links to grants in the U.S. only. In the CAICT research, the top spot was held by nChain, where the Chief Scientist Dr. Craig Wright declares to be Satoshi Nakomoto, Bitcoin’s creator. Alibaba and Mastercard fill the next two places.