Pleased to announce our newly published paper in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Pisa. (Damiano di Francesco Maesa, Matteo Loporchio) titled “Privacy-Preserving and Automated Intellectual Property License Agreements over Heterogeneous Blockchain Networks”. The papaper presents a protocol that enables automated negotiation and enforcement of intellectual property (IP) license agreements across different blockchain platforms — while also preserving the privacy of the involved parties.
Key contributions:
- A framework that allows license agreements to be executed automatically via smart contracts on heterogeneous (i.e. multiple, possibly incompatible) blockchains.
- Mechanisms ensuring that sensitive data (such as identity or proprietary terms) remain private even though agreement execution is transparent or shared across distributed ledgers.
- Analysis of costs/trade-offs (performance, trust, interoperability) when moving from manual / centralized IP licensing to this more decentralized, privacy-aware model.
Potential impact:
- Reducing administrative overhead and delays in licensing processes, especially for SMEs or cross-jurisdiction IP-sharing.
- Greater trust among parties in open innovation settings where revealing full contractual terms or identities is undesirable.
- Laying groundwork for regulatory and business models that accommodate automated contracts while respecting data protection / privacy norms.
The paper is available for download here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2096720925000156?via%3Dihub
Please cite the paper as: Damiano Di Francesco Maesa, Matteo Loporchio, Frank Tietze (2025). Privacy-preserving and automated intellectual property license agreements over heterogeneous blockchain networks. Blockchain: Research and Applications 6, 100288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100288