U.S. Patent 10523421 was awarded to INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION on December 31, 2019 and is entitled “Checkpoints for permissionless blockchains.” The first named inventor is Lawrence Koved of Pleasantville, NY. The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

A certified checkpoint is provided for a ledger comprising a blockchain and a world state. The certified checkpoint enables a third party to recognize and verify that the ledger has integrity, a known starting state, and immutability properties starting at a specific point in time. Certification means that all of the validating peers reached consensus on the state of the ledger at that point in time. Thus, the certified checkpoint state represents an agreed-upon state, and that one or more subsequent operations on the ledger are relative to that agreed-upon state. Preferably, before a checkpoint is certified, it must be consistent, meaning that all validating peers have reached the same value for the checkpoint. Preferably, the checkpoint is a compression of the current blockchain world state into a compact representation (e.g., a hash) of the ledger that based on an agreed-upon consensus protocol is consistent across the (validating) peers. The approach also is extended to a permissionless blockchain. Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on June 26, 2017  as U.S. Patent Application 15/632522 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 10523421. The primary examiner was Malcolm Cribbs.

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION, who is the original assignee of this patent, has at least 150818 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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