On April 23, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent to IBM that relates to the use of distributed layer technology for sharing mobile data across devices.

According to the patent filing, IBM's new product is a follow-up to a previous patent, which was issued in November of 2017 and called "Information Sharing Among Mobile Apparatus." In the new patent, the company describes a means for verifying that data has been successfully shared by two mobile devices.

Invented by a small group of Japanese researchers, the platform described in the patent filing will be able to gather various forms of data and send it to computer nodes located close by. Data events generated will also be published on a distributed ledger, and the data itself would be used as well for mapping data updates.

Objects existing within the platform will be able to share event data across a number of mobile devices, and they will be able to do this in a secure way, without any need of third-party verification. Furthermore, the platform will be able to sense and control connected objects across networks, and it can integrate physical objects into the computer system. These individual connected objects will further be identifiable within the computer system, which means that physical objects will be able to interoperate with current Internet infrastructure.

This patent is the latest in a spate of patents that IBM has either filed or received relating to blockchain technology in the past few months. Earlier this month, the company received a patent related to the use of blockchain technology in helping manage both data and interactions of self-driving cars. The system helps these cars interact with ordinary vehicles by predicting the behavior of those driving the other vehicles.

Last month, IBM received a patent for a system that attempts to improve the security of certain blockchain networks. The company, in the patent filing, described various security methods for resisting what are called replay attacks. It does this while at the same time maintaining both privacy and the validity of user permissions.