🔍 PatentAI: Blockchain-Powered Patent Novelty Checker

PatentAI is a privacy-first, AI-powered platform to verify the novelty of patent documents and record unique results securely on the blockchain. Designed for inventors, researchers, and IP professionals, it combines semantic similarity detection, LLM-based judgment, decentralized storage (IPFS), and smart contracts for transparent patent logging.

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✨ Features

• 🧠 AI-Powered Novelty Detection using SBERT and semantic search (FAISS)
• ✨ LLM Agent Reasoning to classify as Novel / Modified / Plagiarized
• 💾 Secure Result Storage using IPFS
• 🚀 MetaMask Blockchain Submission via Smart Contracts
• 📖 Tailored for USPTO-style patent documents
• 📈 Sleek React UI with animated gradient themes

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🌐 Project Structure

Patents-on-Block-Chain/
├── backend/            # FastAPI backend (LLM, vector DB, IPFS integration)
├── blockchain/         # Solidity contract + Hardhat config
├── react-client/       # Frontend in React.js

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⚙️ Tech Stack

• Frontend: React.js, Tailwind CSS (minimal)
• Backend: FastAPI, SentenceTransformers, Transformers (HuggingFace), FAISS, pdfplumber
• Blockchain: Solidity, Hardhat, ethers.js
• Storage: IPFS (via Pinata), SQLite

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🚫 Requirements

Backend

cd backend
pip install -r requirements.txt

requirements.txt

fastapi
uvicorn
sentence-transformers
transformers
faiss-cpu
pdfplumber
python-multipart
requests

Frontend

cd react-client
npm install

Blockchain

cd blockchain
npm install
npx hardhat compile

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🔧 How to Run

1. Start Backend

cd backend
uvicorn main:app --reload
# Keep it Running, it might shoot some rubbish outputs, end goal is it will show uvicorn started at: https:\\ (our backend URL)

2. Compile + Deploy Smart Contract

cd blockchain
npx hardhat node
# In another terminal:
npx hardhat run scripts/deploy.js --network localhost
# Make sure both things are running in terminal (Don't press stop or kill)

3. Start Frontend

cd react-client
npm start

Visit: http://localhost:3000 (Visit this only if webpage not opens automatically)

4. Configure React

• Update CONTRACT_ADDRESS in MetaMaskSubmit.jsx (This file is located in react-client/src/components)
• Ensure IPFS Pinata keys are correctly set in ipfs_upload.py

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🦊 MetaMask & Hardhat Setup

To interact with the smart contract using MetaMask and the Hardhat local blockchain:

1. Import Hardhat Wallets into MetaMask

• Open MetaMask ➜ Click on account icon ➜ Import Account
• Paste one of the private keys from Hardhat output (from the terminal where we ran "npx hardhat node")
• Repeat to import multiple wallets if needed (for testing multiple users)

2. Add Localhost Network to MetaMask

Go to MetaMask ➜ Settings ➜ Networks ➜ Add Network ➜ Fill in:

Network Name:      Localhost 8545
New RPC URL:       http://127.0.0.1:8545
Chain ID:          31337
Currency Symbol:   ETH

Click Save. Now your MetaMask is ready to interact with Hardhat.

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💡 How It Works

1. Upload a patent document (PDF)
2. Backend extracts title, abstract, and claims
3. SBERT encodes the full text and compares with prior embeddings (FAISS)
4. LLM (FLAN-T5) provides judgment: (a) Clearly novel / (b) Obvious modification / (c) Plagiarized
5. If unique, user can upload result to IPFS
6. If still unique, result can be stored on blockchain with MetaMask

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🎓 Built for ETHDublin Hackathon 2025

Team: PatentAI (ETH Dublin-25)

Open-source contributions welcome! PRs, feature requests and forks appreciated.

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✉️ License

MIT License. See LICENSE file.

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📈 Project Video

Contributions

• Front End and UI + Working Project Demo - Ujwal Mojidra
• Agentic AI and LLMs - Rahul Babu and Sarosh Farhan
• Backend and Containerization - Joel Thomas Chacko