Research dossier for a Featured Post • Public records checked 6 September 2026
The finding that changes the story
There is documentary evidence of an operating-business sale from nChain to a Teranode company. nChain UK Limited’s accounts for 2024 disclose, in note 28 on printed page 39:
“The Company sold its trade and assets to Teranode Limited on 01/01/2025.”
The seller was UK company 09823112. The buyer was UK company 09994132, which became Neobridge Solutions Limited on 4 September 2026. This establishes a transaction between two distinct companies and subsequent continuity of the buyer’s legal identity. It does not identify the Swiss patent portfolio as an asset sold. nChain UK 2024 accounts, note 28; buyer’s current company record.
Separately, official US patent grant entries dated 25 August 2026 still identify nChain Licensing AG as assignee. One names Craig Steven Wright alone; another names him with two co-inventors. These are substantial evidence that the nChain patent-holding name continued to appear after Teranode’s launch. A grant entry establishes the assignee stated at grant; it is not a complete search for subsequent assignments, licences or beneficial ownership. USPTO: US12,719,705; USPTO: US12,719,703.
Publication assessment: a well-supported feature can explain how operating assets, patent title, brands and software permissions followed different paths. The public material reviewed does not establish a single transaction transferring all nChain IP to Teranode.
Ownership and transaction timeline
Dates below distinguish the underlying event from later filing or publication.
| Date | Event and evidence | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| 29–30 June 2015 | The High Court’s later account of Stefan Matthews’s evidence describes heads of terms intended to move DeMorgan-group IP into the nCrypt group, subsequently called nChain. Judgment, paragraph 39 | Background to the corporate research business. This passage recounts evidence; it is not an itemised, judicially verified chain of title. |
| 12 April 2017 | nChain announced that it and affiliated companies had been acquired by High Tech Private Equity Fund SICAV plc, managed by Accuro Fund Solutions. nChain announcement | A company-announced earlier ownership transaction; the consideration was undisclosed. The announcement does not itemise patent assignments. |
| 5 December 2019 | nChain announced an Ayre investment and advisory-board role. nChain announcement | Ayre’s announced investment relationship predates 2023. The release does not disclose the amount or percentage acquired. |
| 13 July / 2 August 2023 | Ayre’s nChain UK PSC notification is dated 13 July. The August announcement describes an Ayre Group investment of up to CHF500 million covering equity, IP licensing for portfolio companies and a credit line. PSC register; Ayre announcement | Corporate control and licensing were already distinct components of the arrangement. The headline sum is not a standalone patent purchase price. |
| 6 February 2024 | nChain reported a portfolio exceeding 3,900 patents and applications, including more than 1,090 grants. nChain release | A historical company-reported portfolio total, not a verified count of Wright’s inventions or currently active rights. |
| 14 March / 20 May 2024 | The court announced its identity findings on 14 March and supplied its written reasons on 20 May. Judgment, paragraphs 7 and 939 | Wright’s claimed authorship of the original Bitcoin materials is a separate issue from ownership of later patent applications. |
| 13 September 2024 | Zero 32 Associates Ltd became Teranode Limited, retaining company number 09994132. Company name history | The UK buyer existed before the Teranode Group public launch. |
| 1 January 2025 | nChain UK’s sale of trade and assets to Teranode Limited. Disclosure filed in October 2025. Seller’s accounts, note 28 | Confirmed sale at the UK operating-company level; asset schedule and consideration remain unidentified. |
| 15 January 2025 | Teranode Group publicly launched and appointed Giuliano Di Vitantonio CEO. Group announcement | A public group launch, distinct from the earlier transaction date. The announcement supplies no patent assignment schedule. |
| 25 March 2025 | TERANODE trademark ownership changed from Bitcoin Association for BSV to Teranode Licensing AG; the Canadian record shows the change registered on 1 May. CIPO 2223943 | A specific trademark transfer. Its seller was the association. |
| 18 April 2025 | A published paper identifies two authors as Teranode Group employees and attributes relevant pending patent applications to nChain Licensing AG. Publisher record; author manuscript, conflicts statement, p. 15 | Evidence of research/personnel continuity alongside a continuing attribution of patent ownership to nChain. |
| 25 June 2025 | Teranode Limited’s 2024 accounts identify its Liechtenstein parent and ultimate controller and disclose a post-year-end commitment involving service agreements and employees. Buyer’s accounts, notes 9–10 | Additional evidence about the buyer and planned operational transition; the counterparty in note 9 is unnamed. |
| 12 September / 3 December 2025 | NEOBRIDGE has Swiss priority dated 12 September and an international filing/registration date of 3 December. CIPO 2461671 | The brand application names Teranode Licensing AG’s Zug branch. Canadian examination is still pending in the record reviewed. |
| March–August 2026 | Multiple official US grants identify nChain Licensing AG as assignee; examples appear below. | Continuing patent-grant activity under that legal name. |
| 4 September 2026 | Teranode Limited became Neobridge Solutions Limited. Companies House | A current corporate-name development, with the same UK company number. It does not establish a group-wide rename. |
Entity map
The table maps established relationships. It deliberately leaves the unverified Swiss shareholding chain open.
| Person or entity | Identifiable role | Relationship supported by the reviewed evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Craig Steven Wright | Individual named on later patents | Recorded inventor or co-inventor on the sampled patents; the named assignee is a company. See the patent table. |
| Calvin Edward Ayre | Individual exercising corporate control | Current UK PSC records show control of both UK companies, in different bands. nChain UK; Neobridge. |
| nChain / nChain group | Collective commercial description | The brand alone is insufficient to identify a contracting party or patent owner. Each record must be matched to its legal entity. |
| EITC Holdings / nChain Holdings | Historical names appearing in reporting and assignment histories | Reuters described the EITC-to-nChain naming history in 2017; the 2017 company announcement names nChain Holdings Limited. These historical references require jurisdiction and identity matching before being joined to later Swiss entities. Reuters; 2017 announcement. |
| nChain AG, Switzerland | Parent named in the seller’s accounts | Immediate parent of nChain UK in its 2024 accounts. Those accounts name DW Discovery Selection Fund as ultimate controlling party. Note 29. |
| nChain UK Limited — 09823112 | UK operating company and seller | Sold its trade and assets; still appears as a separate active UK company. Company record. |
| nChain Licensing AG, Switzerland | Patent assignee | Expressly named in the USPTO examples. Its complete current shareholder chain was not established in this review. |
| Teranode Group AG, Liechtenstein | Parent of the UK buyer | Named as immediate and ultimate parent undertaking in the buyer’s 2024 accounts, which identify C Ayre as ultimate controller. Note 10. |
| Teranode Limited / Neobridge Solutions Limited — 09994132 | Same UK company under successive names | Buyer in January 2025; Neobridge name from September 2026. Company record. |
| Teranode Licensing AG, Liechtenstein | Trademark holder/applicant | TERANODE registrant in the Canadian record. NEOBRIDGE names its Zug branch: “Teranode Licensing AG, Vaduz, Zweigniederlassung Zug.” TERANODE; NEOBRIDGE. |
| Teranode Switzerland AG | Separate company appearing in software notices | Named in the 2025 copyright notice of a Teranode Group repository. A copyright notice does not establish its entire asset inventory or parentage. Repository. |
| Bitcoin Association for BSV / BSV Association | Association appearing in trademark and software records | Former TERANODE trademark owner; BSV Association is the named licensor in the Teranode node repository. CIPO; node licence. |
Control qualification: the current nChain UK PSC entry gives Ayre more than 50% but less than 75% of shares and votes; the Neobridge entry gives 75% or more. Both include appointment/removal rights. These disclosures must be read alongside the fund named in the seller’s accounts and the buyer’s reference to an unnamed company in which its ultimate beneficial owner is a minority shareholder. They do not supply a reconciled ownership chart for every nChain and Teranode entity. No inconsistency should be explained by inventing an intermediate holding company or assuming identical reporting scopes.
IP ownership and rights table
| Asset or right | Best-supported holder or participant | Evidence and boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Sampled granted patents | nChain Licensing AG | Official US grant entries below. Evidence is specific to each patent and grant date. |
| Wider nChain patent applications | Ownership requires application-by-application verification | The April 2025 authors’ disclosure attributes relevant pending applications to nChain Licensing AG, but supplies no application-number schedule. Manuscript, p. 15. |
| Personal patent rights retained by Wright | Unresolved | No specific, currently retained, material Bitcoin-related patent was established as personally owned by Wright in this review. This is not proof that none exists. |
| nChain UK’s operating assets | Teranode Limited, now Neobridge Solutions Limited, was the disclosed buyer | The acquisition is documented; patents, repositories, product rights and contracts are not individually enumerated in the sale disclosure. Seller’s accounts. |
| TERANODE trademark | Teranode Licensing AG in the Canadian register | International registration 1697341; Canadian registration TMA1332864. Transfer effective 25 March 2025; Canadian registration dated 18 July 2025. This establishes the recorded trademark position, not worldwide patent title. CIPO. |
| NEOBRIDGE trademark application | Teranode Licensing AG’s Zug branch | International registration 1906121; Canadian application 2461671. Canadian status is formalized/awaiting examination. An international registration is not confirmation of protection granted in every designated country. CIPO. |
| Teranode node software permissions | BSV Association, named licensor | Open BSV License version 6 in the repository permits specified uses subject to conditions, including exclusive use on the BSV Blockchain. This does not inventory all copyright owners or establish a licence to every nChain patent. Licence. |
| A Teranode Group DID resolver repository | Teranode Switzerland AG, named copyright claimant | The repository carries its copyright notice and an Apache 2.0 licence. This is a specific software record, not proof of ownership of every former nChain codebase. Repository. |
| Commercial IP licensing rights | Ayre Ventures portfolio companies, as described in the 2023 announcement | Licensing was a stated component of the Ayre–nChain deal. The agreements, exclusivity, sublicensing powers, territories and covered patents were not available in the reviewed announcement. Ayre release. |
| Shares in an IP-holding company | Shareholder chain not established for nChain Licensing AG | Ownership/control of a company and title to the company’s assets are different layers. The UK company records cannot fill the Swiss shareholder gap. |
Patent examples checked
This is a targeted sample, not a representative sample or a portfolio census. All six US entries below are official USPTO publications identifying nChain Licensing AG, Zug, Switzerland as assignee.
| Patent and official source | Grant date | Recorded inventor(s) | Subject illustrated |
|---|---|---|---|
| US12,719,705 B2 — Methods and systems for distributed blockchain functionalities | 25 Aug 2026 | Craig Steven Wright | Distribution of blockchain mining work; illustrates a sole-inventor record with corporate assignment. |
| US12,719,703 B2 — Revoking access to a network | 25 Aug 2026 | Chloe Tartan; Alexander Mackay; Craig Steven Wright | Blockchain certificates and access revocation for an IoT network. |
| US12,676,762 B2 — Physically unclonable functions | 7 Jul 2026 | Jack Owen Davies; Craig Steven Wright | Hardware-linked cryptographic identity verification. |
| US12,619,982 B2 — Single-use tokens | 5 May 2026 | Bassem Ammar; Wei Zhang; Craig Steven Wright | Issuance of redeemable tokens using blockchain transactions. |
| US12,615,164 B2 — Blockchain based transaction protocol | 28 Apr 2026 | Andrew James Mee | Merchant/customer transaction processing; Wright is not listed. |
| US12,574,227 B2 — Bio-locked seed | 10 Mar 2026 | Antoaneta Serguieva; Craig Steven Wright | Biometric vaults recorded through blockchain transactions. |
The two European examples in the original handout also remain useful discovery records:
| Publication | Google Patents’ displayed position | Verification limit |
|---|---|---|
| EP4087183B1 — Time-release encryption over a blockchain network | nChain Licensing AG; Wright and Thomas Trevethan; grant publication 20 August 2025. | Current EPO/national-register ownership was not independently verified in this review. |
| EP4340295B1 — Transferring access to a digital asset | nChain Licensing AG; Wright, John Fletcher and Thomas Trevethan; grant publication 14 May 2025. | Same limitation. Google explicitly qualifies assignee and legal-status information. |
Record-date trap: Google’s history for US20220027903A1 includes inventor-to-company assignments and later entries categorised as changes of name involving nChain Holdings and nChain Licensing. A February 2025 recordal is therefore not automatically a February 2025 sale. The underlying instrument and its effective date must be checked before placing it on a transaction timeline. Google currently labels that application abandoned; this review did not confirm that status in Patent Center.
Wright personally, later inventions and original Bitcoin materials
The patent sample supplies two especially useful distinctions. US12,719,705 names Wright alone while naming nChain Licensing AG as assignee. US12,615,164 names Andrew James Mee without Wright. Consequently, neither the count of patents naming Wright nor the count of patents held by nChain can substitute for the other.
For the original Bitcoin white paper and software, the May 2024 judgment states that Wright was not their author, was not the person operating as Satoshi Nakamoto in the relevant period and did not create the Bitcoin system. Those identity findings should not be presented as a decision adjudicating the validity or title of every later nChain patent. Equally, being listed as an inventor on a later patent does not establish authorship of the original Bitcoin materials. Judgment, paragraph 7.
The research did not establish Wright’s complete personal holdings, retained contractual rights, royalties or interests through other companies. A claim that he retained none would go beyond the evidence.
What moved toward Teranode, and what remains attributable to nChain
Confirmed: the UK operating-company transaction; a separate trademark transfer from the association; the UK buyer’s later name change; and the legal entities named in the sampled software and patent records.
Supported continuity: the buyer’s note 9 records a commitment to assume service agreements and employees from an unnamed company. Separately, the April 2025 paper by Benjamin Brooks, Luigi Lunardon and Alessio Pagani says all three had worked at nChain during the research; Brooks and Lunardon were then at Teranode Group. These sources support an operational and research connection. They do not reveal the complete employment transfer, code inventory or patent schedule. Buyer’s accounts, note 9; authors’ disclosure.
Continuing nChain attribution: the US grant records, including August 2026 entries, still name nChain Licensing AG. The authors’ 2025 disclosure also attributes pending applications to that company. These findings support continued patent holdings under the nChain Licensing name, but do not resolve the holder’s shareholders, licences granted to Teranode companies, security interests, unrecorded assignments or the fate of the entire portfolio.
Unresolved: no itemised assignment of the wider nChain patent portfolio to a Teranode entity was established. This is a result of the records reviewed, not proof that no assignment or licence exists.
Transaction value
The only headline amount verified here is the 2023 commitment of up to CHF500 million, announced as a combination of equity, licensing and credit. It cannot be used as the purchase price of the January 2025 UK business or as a measured value of the patents alone. The reviewed sale disclosure provides no consideration or allocation among asset classes. 2023 announcement; 2024 seller’s accounts, note 28.
Counts, status and the meaning of “Bitcoin-related”
| Question | Defensible answer at this stage |
|---|---|
| How many patents/applications name Wright? | A current, normalized worldwide total was not established. The sample confirms both sole and joint inventorship records. |
| How many were assigned to nChain Licensing AG? | Five US grants naming Wright are verified in the table, plus one grant naming another inventor. This is a documented sample, not the portfolio total. |
| How large was the nChain portfolio? | nChain’s February 2024 release claimed over 3,900 patents and applications, with over 1,090 grants. Keep the date and company attribution attached. |
| How many are now active, pending, expired, abandoned or revoked? | No reliable current aggregate was established. Grant publications alone do not answer maintenance, opposition, appeal or national-lapse questions. |
| Are these specifically Bitcoin rights? | The sample spans blockchain mining, transactions, IoT certificates, biometrics and cryptography. Each patent’s claims need separate analysis; a Bitcoin example in a specification does not make every claim Bitcoin-exclusive. |
The historical portfolio count comes from nChain’s own release. It does not identify how many distinct invention families it represents or how many documents name Wright.
A defensible census needs a fixed cut-off date and separate counts for invention families, applications, publication documents and jurisdiction-specific grants. It must normalize inventor and assignee variants, follow recorded assignments and renamings, and check each jurisdiction’s status. One family can generate multiple applications and grants, while different members can have different owners or statuses. A full census and legal-title audit were not completed here.
Recommended Featured Post approach
Working title: Tracing nChain’s IP Through Teranode and NeoBridge
Editorial proposition: reconstruct the actual movements, showing readers which company is named against each type of right and where the public record ends.
Suggested sequence:
- Lead with the dated UK asset sale and the buyer’s recent NeoBridge name change.
- Explain the corporate chain that is supported by the buyer’s accounts.
- Show the recent patent grants under nChain Licensing AG, using one sole-inventor and one joint-inventor example.
- Trace TERANODE and NEOBRIDGE through the trademark records.
- Explain the separate software licences and copyright notices.
- Close with the unresolved asset schedule, Swiss shareholder chain, deal consideration and portfolio status totals.
The current evidence can sustain that feature. A definitive article claiming to identify the current owner of every relevant patent would require additional records.
Specific reporting questions still open
- To nChain Licensing AG: provide the current legal owner/shareholder chain and an application-number inventory, with assignments, licences, security interests and status changes since 2023.
- To nChain UK and Neobridge Solutions: identify the assets included and excluded from the 1 January 2025 transaction, the consideration and any patent, software, product or customer-contract schedules.
- To Teranode Group: identify the legal group structure and whether rights originating at nChain were acquired outright, licensed, sublicensed or accessed through common corporate control.
- To Teranode Licensing AG and BSV Association: identify the territories and rights covered by the TERANODE transaction and the relationship between trademark ownership and node-software licensing.
- To Wright or an authorised representative: identify any claimed retained patents, applications or contractual rights by number and current registered owner.
These are prepared reporting questions; no enquiries have been sent.
The buyer’s next accounts, for the year ended 31 December 2025, are shown as due 30 September 2026. They are a useful next checkpoint for acquisition disclosures, although no particular disclosure can be assumed in advance. Companies House.
Research scope and reproducibility
Primary sources used include filed UK accounts and company records, Canadian trademark records, US patent grant gazettes, the High Court judgment, corporate announcements, software repositories and an authors’ research disclosure. The seller’s note 28 and buyer’s notes 9–10 were checked in both the filed XHTML and rendered PDF pages: printed page 39/PDF page 42 for nChain UK, and printed page 7/PDF page 8 for Teranode Limited.
Google Patents was used for discovery and supplementary European examples. Live EPO register verification could not be completed because the relevant requests failed; current European title and national status therefore remain qualified. No complete USPTO assignment export, WIPO portfolio export, private shareholder register, acquisition contract or commercial licence agreement was obtained.
The conclusions concern public evidence available in this review as of 6 September 2026. They distinguish documented events, record-based attributions, supported continuity and unresolved ownership rather than treating all Bitcoin-related IP as one asset.
September 6, 2026
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