U.S. Patent 10396997 was awarded to INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION on August 27, 2019 and is entitled “Container-based operating system and method.” The first named inventor is John V. Delaney of Kildalkey, . The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

In a distributed network hosting a shared pool of configurable computing resources there is provided one or more system instances of a blockchain. Each system instance comprises a virtual machine and a set of containers. The containers are members of the blockchain in that the blockchain’s public ledger records encrypted copies of at least selected directories of each container. Each container that is in the set can thus verify whether any other container also belongs to the same set with reference to the public ledger, since the transactions recorded on the public ledger are encrypted copies of the set’s containers. The use of a blockchain thus allows a system boundary to be defined around a set of containers by the initial specification of the blockchain. The system boundary can be defined to ensure that the set of containers comply with legal requirements, such as a geographic restriction. Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on December 14, 2016  as U.S. Patent Application 15/379196 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 10396997. The primary examiner was Dant B Shaifer Harriman.

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 3 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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