U.S. Patent 11036395 was awarded to NEC CORPORATION on June 15, 2021 and is entitled “Secure and transparent pruning for blockchains.” The first named inventor is Ghassan Karame of Heidelberg, . The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

A method for pruning a blockchain of a blockchain network includes creating an active blocks commitments Merkle tree from hashes of active blocks and creating an active smart contracts commitments Merkle tree from hashes of active smart contracts. The Merkle trees are created after an amount of blocks created in the blockchain has reached a threshold set by a pruning threshold parameter stored in the blockchain network. Hashes of the roots of the Merkle trees are stored in a header of a new block as a new genesis block. The new genesis block is broadcast to the blockchain network. A local copy of the blockchain is pruned at a pruning point in accordance with the pruning threshold parameter based on the blockchain network having reached consensus on the new genesis block. Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on January 11, 2019  as U.S. Patent Application 16/245268 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 11036395. The primary examiner was Dinku W Gebresenbet.

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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