U.S. Patent 11212081 was awarded to NEC CORPORATION on December 28, 2021 and is entitled “Method for signing a new block in a decentralized blockchain consensus network.” The first named inventor is Ghassan Karame of Heidelberg, . The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

A method for signing a new block of a blockchain of a distributed blockchain consensus network (DBCN), comprising a mining computing entity (MCE) and a node computing entity, includes the step of signing and/or encrypting of predefined MCE information by the MCE, using a secret key of a public key/secret key key pair of the MCE to obtain hidden information (HI). The new block is signed by the MCE using the secret key and block information comprising block height information to create a signature for the new block. In a case of at least one further signing of a different block with the respective same block height information by the MCE, reveal information is provided to reveal the HI to the DBCN by another node computing entity of the DBCN when the node computing entity has received two signatures comprising the same corresponding block height information. Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on February 24, 2017  as U.S. Patent Application 16/487114 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 11212081. The primary examiner was Maung T Lwin.

NEC CORPORATION, who is the original assignee of this patent, has at least 32150 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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