U.S. Patent 10783590 was awarded to Alibaba Group Holding Limited on September 22, 2020 and is entitled “Mutual aid network based on smart contract and blockchain.” The first named inventor is Fan Zhou of Hangzhou, . The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

Disclosed herein are methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for implementing a mutual aid network. One of the methods includes maintaining a particular blockchain specifically for handling requests for aid from a group of members; receiving transaction data encoding user responses to queries from the blockchain network for requesting the user responses regarding a particular request for aid; executing the smart contract using the particular blockchain to process the transaction data; in response to response results indicating that sufficient user responses have been received from the members of the subset of the group, and that a sufficient percentage of the subset of the group have agreed to the particular request for aid, computing an amount of contribution due to each member of the group; and instructing a gateway to trigger the amount of contribution to originate from each member of the group. Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on December 13, 2019  as U.S. Patent Application 16/713446 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 10783590. The primary examiner was Ojo O Oyebisi.

Alibaba Group Holding Limited, who is the original assignee of this patent, has at least 1834 total granted patents in the United States as of the date of this article. This blockchain patent has been cited 0 times by other U.S. patents according to our law firm research, and can be considered an innovative patent in the field of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

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