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Can Tokenized Patents Unlock University Research Funding?

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Universities have been, since inception, centers of knowledge, equally contributing to education and to research. In the modern era, this also means that universities are a major source of technical intellectual property (IPs), especially patents.

This can form an important source of revenue for universities, as well as academic researchers. This is not without creating some tensions between the multiple different missions of universities.

“Balancing revenue generation against the public-knowledge mission has intensified as a task as public funding has declined and operating costs have risen.”

This is generally given as a task to the Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), which have institutionalized this shift across research universities, with structures and processes dedicated to registering and monetizing IPs.

In this established set-up, blockchain-based IP tokenization mechanisms have begun to attract attention in academic settings, although their use remains experimental and their implications for university governance are far from settled.

A new study by Andreas Peters, a researcher at Rosenheim Technical University of Applied Sciences (Germany), analyzes how this can apply to universities’ IPs, and how it also mirrors economic and financial questions raised by IP tokenization of other illiquid assets such as private equity, real estate, and infrastructure debt. It found that in certain conditions, tokenization could create liquidity and easier monetization opportunities for universities’ IPs.

He published his results in International Review of Economics & Finance1, under the title “Tokenization under governance and liquidity constraints: The case of university intellectual property”.

Universities’ IPs & Tokenization

Research Vs Applications

Despite the idea that universities’ IPs are valuable, and they generally are in a technical sense, monetization is often a challenge. In practice, only a small fraction of the total IP portfolio is properly monetized, limiting the actual profit for the universities.

“Licensing income is concentrated in a small number of patents, so that revenue at many offices need not cover staff, legal, and administrative costs once these are fully accounted for”

In large part, this is because of systematic conflicts between academic and commercial logics within universities: different time horizons, different definitions of success, different audiences.

This is because what research will promote a researcher’s career, and what will be valuable to monetize, is more often than not very different experiments.

For example, finding a new type of material that could be used in a battery cathode will be highly valuable research for progressing academic careers.

But to make it into a valuable technical IP, other data are needed, with further work on scalability of the production process, durability in real-life conditions over several years, consideration of rare element costs and availability, etc. But such work is both expensive and time-consuming, while providing much less valuable publishable material to the researchers.

The Case For Tokenization

Tokenizing real-world assets creates a funding channel for assets that otherwise trade infrequently or only through bespoke contracts. So far, the largest tokenization efforts have been with assets like bonds, with observable cash flows, established issuer credit, and market-making institutions. A very different situation than with universities’ patents.

However, this IP is often under-monetized, so making it more liquid and accessible to investors could raise its value. In turn, this would give universities further incentive to create and monetize more IP, increasing the value of the token further, creating a positive feedback loop.

The study identifies a few parameters that tokenization could help improve: lower licensing-transaction friction, a broader potential-licensee pool, and a shorter interval between patent grant and first licensing revenue.

Simulating Tokenization

As tokenization efforts for IPs are still nascent at best, especially for universities’ IPs, the study performed a simulation of how and when tokenization becomes beneficial to universities’ patent portfolios.

A key factor will be lifting the hindrance to IP monetization.

Individual patents are highly heterogeneous, with idiosyncratic value drivers (technical scope, prosecution history, jurisdictional coverage, complementary IP), long payoff horizons that may extend over the full twenty-year patent life, and information asymmetries between the issuing university and external investors.

All these factors depressed the price of each specific patent, and the portfolio as a whole. As such, it is important that a potential token address these questions.

It is also important that the costs of tokenization do not consume any benefit the process created, with liquidity a major factor to keep in mind.

“A token that cannot be traded efficiently does not function as a token in the financial sense; it is a smart-contract wrapper around an otherwise illiquid claim. Liquidity, then, is not peripheral to the governance framework but central to its operational meaning.”

Toward Tokenized University Patents

Building A Tokenized IP Portfolio

Tokenizing individual patents would not solve the issue of such IP being too complex to value or too illiquid.

So instead, rather than tokenizing individual patents, a university may construct portfolio tokens that represent fractional ownership of a basket of patents drawn from the institutional IP portfolio. This would make tokenized IP similar in its process to asset-backed securities and exchange-traded funds, by offering both risk diversification and access to a broad set of assets with one purchase of a more liquid asset.

Ideally, this should make sector distribution, technology readiness, and royalty exposure easier to compare.

Overall, the final design of a tokenized IP portfolio will need to balance out the liquidity improvement, which diminishes past a certain point, with the design burden, which increases with each additional patent added to the token.

Proper management of these assets will also need to be created. The study proposes a combination of strategic oversight by the university and independent legal and technical review for better credibility and objectivity, as well as more objective reporting and management of possible conflicts of interest.

It will also be important that the token architecture does not hinder further research efforts. So every token design should specify publication rights, data access, and research-use carve-outs explicitly.

Meanwhile, universities should monitor in long-run review whether tokenization shifts hiring, promotion, research priorities, publication timing, or access, since individually defensible projects can in series produce cumulative mission drift.

Implementation Recommendations

The study recommends first engaging with pilot-sized projects to check if tokenization works as intended. They should be governed by reversible loss, institutional capacity, and the ability to measure spreads, depth, costs, and licensing outcomes.

Depending on local legislation, financial law will determine which offering route is open for such a product, but only after taking into account IP laws.

“Patent law determines which rights architecture is available at all, and that layer binds first, because a structure that patent law empties of value cannot be rescued by choosing a favorable securities regime.”

Some aspects of patent law might also need to be taken into account. Especially if the ownership of the token grants partial ownership of the patents themselves, something most smart contracts will need to avoid to keep the system functional.

“In the absence of an agreement to the contrary, 35 U.S.C. §262 permits each United States patent co-owner to practice the invention without the others’ consent or an obligation to account to them. Direct fractional legal title can therefore undermine exclusive licensing unless co-owner rights are effectively allocated by agreement. ”

Other countries will have their own issues depending on their own specific rules about university patents. For example, German law requires the allocation of exploitation revenue to account for inventor remuneration. Or Swiss law provides a statutory framework for qualifying ledger-based rights, but that framework does not itself alter the ownership or licensing rules applicable to an underlying patent.

Investors Takeaways

Tokenization of real-world assets is only getting started. In the long run, it might be the driving force in monetizing more efficiently not just physical or financial assets, but also all manners of intellectual property.

This means that investments in technology enabling such protocols will likely benefit from the extension of tokenization beyond financial markets and into many other asset classes.

For investors, this also means they should stay on the lookout for such new opportunities, and it is likely that they will initially still suffer part of the discount applied to traditional university patents, before being priced correctly later.

This study is also a reminder that not all tokenization processes are equal, and that while some assets are relatively speaking easy to tokenize, like equities, some like IPs need more dedicated framework and experience before being generally used.

Investing in Tokenization

Franklin Templeton (formerly Franklin Resources)

BEN Price Chart

Franklin Templeton is an American multinational investment management holding company that operates as one of the world’s largest independent asset managers, with around $1.79T in assets under management (AUM). Equities and then fixed income form the bulk of these assets.

The common technical platform supports a variety of financial boutiques:

Another Franklin product is its proprietary Benji platform, which supplies a concrete example of blockchain infrastructure supporting tokenized investment products.

In general, it is likely that most successful tokenization efforts will be established in partnership with traditional financial institutions like Franklin, benefiting from their experience, established IT and financial infrastructure, as well as reputation and connections with regulators.

“We develop blockchain-enabled technologies to create efficiencies within traditional financial assets. Our proprietary tokenization platform, known as the Benji® technology platform, includes a digital asset transfer agent, management system for digital assets, and digital wallet infrastructure.”

This makes Franklin a good stock to get some exposure to tokenization, as well as asset management in all forms, with the stock more of a “pick-and-shovel” type of investment connected to the “plumbing” of the financial system.

Latest Franklin Templeton (BEN) Stock News and Developments

Study Referenced

1. Andreas Peters. Tokenization under governance and liquidity constraints: The case of university intellectual property. International Review of Economics & Finance. December 2026. Article: 105905. Volume 112. 10.1016/j.iref.2026.105905

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Jonathan is a former biochemist researcher who worked in genetic analysis and clinical trials. He is now a stock analyst and finance writer with a focus on innovation, market cycles and geopolitics in his publication 'The Eurasian Century".