U.S. Patent 10958628 was awarded to INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION on March 23, 2021 and is entitled “Protecting sensitive data in a distributed ledger system using a blockchain channel hierarchy.” The first named inventor is Kapil Kumar Singh of Cary, NC. The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

A blockchain hierarchy comprises an arrangement of blockchain channels organized such that a blockchain channel at a lower level feeds data to another blockchain channel, e.g., a relatively higher level. At least one blockchain channel comprises a private autonomous subset of peers in the set of peers that comprise the blockchain network. Within that particular subset, one of the peers is elected as a leader entity, which has the capability of also joining another private or public blockchain channel, e.g., one at a higher level in the hierarchy. The leader entity includes a capability to enforce a data protection policy within the blockchain channel that it leads. To this end, the leader filters or declassifies data based on some task-specific (or blockchain channel-specific) data protection policy, and it then makes that data available to one or more other blockchain channels in the hierarchy (directly or indirectly). Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on December 18, 2017  as U.S. Patent Application 15/845752 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 10958628. The primary examiner was Dao Q Ho.

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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