Verizon, the Telecommunications conglomerate  is interested in  the use of blockchain technology to lay emphasis on the dynamic creation of virtual SIM cards.
 

A patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the concept was granted the company on Sept. 10, in this invention, could do away with pre-inserted, branded physical SIM cards.
 
The  innovation wants to deal with virtual Sim as against the physical Sim card. The  patent describes how a physical SIM card can be replaced by a software equivalent – a virtual SIM (vSIM) which is more secured with blockchain-based encryption.

Ultimately, the Sim will be in like software in the phone, a device on the mobile network would create a user account for storing one or more vSIMs.

Then there will be a selection of network services the account will work with. 
A blockchain record will be created by the network device including a vSIM certificate for the network services and a number that uniquely identifies all users of a cellphone network known as an International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI).

The vSIM certificate is then linked to the user account and can be activated on a client’s mobile device.

Thus, participating nodes on the “distributed consensus network” will then maintain a list of records that Verizon calls a vSIM blockchain. As soon as this is properly done, there wont be any form of malicous tampering as it would be secured by storing  time-stamped transactions in cryptographically secured blocks. 

According to the patent “ Verizon", records on the vSIM blockchain would be stored for efficiency and to ensure that blocks are received without being   unaltered or damaged in a hash tree structure.

Verizon stated that, the vSIM can be assigned with any of the  multiple mobile devices linked to the user account and transferred between the devices. Saying It could as well be temporarily assigned to other users too.
Backing it all up would be a vSIM platform using a number of application programming interfaces (APIs).

According to the patent:

“It then means the vSim can be assigned to new users and on the other hand redirected to another user  and users can accept new vSIM certificates into a user account, transfer a vSIM among client devices associated with the user account, or deliver a vSIM certificate to another user.”

Summarily, by using the same system, a company could purchase a number of vSIMs, assign them to its staff as the choose and later on  re-assign them to other employees in same system.

Filament, a firm working on blockchain hardware for the internet of things had previously received $15m funding from Verizon.
 
Credit: Daniel Palmer