By: Christos Makridis

Intellectual property (IP) is an integral part of economic activity because it provides not only legal protection under the rule of law to inventors and creators, but also incentives for exclusive access to benefit from the discovery. “US IP-intensive industries accounted for 41% of national economic activity in 2019,” according to the US Patent and Trademark Office. Although the costs associated with fraud and piracy are difficult to quantify and detect, trade in counterfeit goods for the European Union (EU) accounts for 6.8% of imports from non-EU countries, according to 2016 data of the OECD.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), or digital assets used to authenticate ownership, along with near-field communication (NFC), have the potential to…