Two institutional giants have secured crypto related patents. The pair includes Bank of America (BofA) which has won a patent for a cryptocurrency storage platform in enterprise accounts and Amazon, which has been awarded two patents for distributed data storage and cryptography.

Bank of America submitted the crypto patents for approval in June 2014. The patent describes how enterprise accounts will safely store customers’ cryptocurrency assets.

According to the patent filing:

“As technology advances, financial transactions involving cryptocurrency have become more common. For some enterprises, it may be desirable to aggregate cryptocurrency deposited by customers in an enterprise account.”

Bank of America Now Has 50 Blockchain Related Patents

The patent details the possibility of making transactions and converting crypto coins within the account. As a result, this eliminates the need for a crypto exchange by “simplifying the purchase and exchange of currencies and cryptocurrencies and reducing the fees associated with doing so.”

Earlier this year in February, BofA filed a report to the SEC which outlined how cryptocurrencies are a threat to traditional banking. To ensure they don’t end up being obsolete the bank has been filling dozens of cryptocurrency and blockchain related patents.

According to Catherine Bessant, the chief operations and technology officer, BofA now has 50 patents.

“We’ve got under 50 patents in the blockchain/distributed ledger space. While we’ve not found large-scale opportunities, we want to be ahead of it. We want to be prepared.”

Amazon Has Won Two Patents

Amazon is the other large corporation that is trying to stay ahead of the competition. The company has been awarded two patents. The first patent was filed in April. According to the patent document, it will add security to users’ signatures by “protecting the integrity of digital signatures and encrypted communications.”

The document states:

“…the signature authority provides a key-distribution service that distributes blocks of cryptographic keys to authorized signing delegates. An authorized signing delegate contacts the key-distribution service and requests a block of cryptographic keys.”

The other patent was filled in December 2015. It focuses on data storage by using a ‘grid encoding technique.’ According to the patent, data will be collected in ‘shards,’ and be logically grouped together and distributed