RKVST Granted Patent Enabling ‘Practical Scale for Blockchain’ 

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. and CAMBRIDGE, U.K. – June 1, 2023 – RKVST announced it has been granted a U.S. patent that the company said enables practical scale for blockchains, putting an end to the limitless storage requirements that come with ever-growing transaction data, improving scalability, performance, availability and cost.

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) are emerging as a fundamental building block of new digital communications platforms. The ability to securely store, trade and compute data in a shared responsibility system is enormously powerful, reaching far beyond cryptocurrency and NFT use cases to include supply chain, environmental, social and governance (ESG) implementation, internet of things (IoT), regulatory compliance and audit and many more.

Blockchains record, confirm and log a sequence of transactions, and it is a well-known feature that as the number of transactions increases, the more data is created, necessitating an increase in storage capacity. What’s more, blockchains are immutable, meaning nothing is ever deleted from the ledger, so storage requirements constantly grow. This leads to problems with scalability, performance and availability, as well as cost.

The patent on Data Structure Storage Optimisation, invented by Jon Geater and Mansoor Ahmed-Rengers, enables more flexible storage of the chain data in parts without losing the end-to-end cryptographic verifiability of the chain. This addresses fears and costs of maintaining ever-growing data.

Jon Geater, co-founder and chief product officer, RKVST, said: “At RKVST we’re working hard to make blockchain practical for real-world, enterprise use. The RKVST blockchain-powered platform provides proof of origin, proof of provenance and proof of authenticity for any data, which is fundamental for any supply chain. In implementing the technology behind this patent, we can deliver portable data integrity, transparency and trust for the long term without the burden of ever-increasing operational overheads.”

Known techniques exist today that aim to mitigate the blockchain storage problem by reducing the storage space required for the blocks – squashing empty blocks together or using compression to reduce the storage space requirement for all blocks in general. While these solutions help to a certain extent, they only delay the inevitable and eventually the same storage issues arise. This innovation will be transformational in terms of the scalability and cost of deploying blockchain, and rapidly brings forward the time when blockchain is ubiquitous across enterprise applications.