U.S. Patent 10630672 was awarded to Alibaba Group Holding Limited on April 21, 2020 and is entitled “Performing a change of primary node in a distributed system.” The first named inventor is Peng Lin of Shandong, . The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

A method of performing a change of a primary node in a blockchain network includes a backup node of the blockchain network determining that an epoch change needs to be performed, determining a respective weight of the backup node associated with each of three phases of a consensus process in a current epoch, determining a weight sum for the backup node based on the respective weights, sending an EPOCH_CHANGE message to the other network nodes to apply for a new primary node in a new epoch, receiving NEW_EPOCH messages from the other network nodes, determining whether a number of valid NEW_EPOCH messages exceeds a second predetermined threshold, and determining the backup node to be the new primary node in the new epoch in response to determining that the number of valid NEW_EPOCH messages exceeds the second predetermined threshold. Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on May 24, 2019  as U.S. Patent Application 16/421953 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 10630672. The primary examiner was Abiy Getachew.

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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