Mastercard, an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in New York, United States has developed a new way to anonymize cryptocurrency transactions. According to a patent application published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the company has introduced a method of managing transactions over a blockchain which would anonymize both the point of source and the amount being transacted.
The patent further described that this anonymizing method involves storing a key pair holding a private key and public key. It also involves receiving an anonymization call from a computing device and collecting one block in a blockchain which is being composed of a block header and one or more transaction data values including a specific transaction data value. The amount will also be protected by utilizing various transfers through added addresses.
The patent said
This would result in showing the user only transferring funds to and receiving funds from a small number of addresses that are also involved in a significantly large volume of transactions with various other users, thereby rendering the data innocuous.
The system would operate by utilizing an intervening address throughout a transaction that communicates with the public key. The transaction information is then saved, while a new transaction and digital signature are created utilizing a private key. The new transaction data, which would include the target address and the payment amount, would be transmitted on.
The filing further elaborated that the first key pair may be saved in a memory of a processing server wherein the initial key pair is composed of a first private key and an identical public key. After this, an anonymization call may be accepted by a receiving device of the processing server from a computing device such as the sender’s device wherein the anonymization request comprises at least a target address and a transaction amount.
The transfer call may comprise at least the sender’s digital signature, the target address of the recipient, and a particular amount being transferred. In some materializations, the transfer call may comprise data recognizing the beneficiary device in place of the target address, where such identifying data may hold a device identifier linked with the recipient device which is utilized for communication therewith, such as a telephone number, e-mail address, media access control address, internet protocol address, etc. In such materializations, the processing server may be configured to interact with the recipient device to get a target address therefrom.
Mastercard and Crypto-Blockchain Patents
This is not the first time Mastercard has won a cryptocurrency/blockchain patent. In the month of July 2018, the payment giant won a US patent for speeding up cryptocurrency transactions. According to the patent, blockchain based transaction often takes approximately 10 min to process the transaction because of the computer processing time and resources need to authenticate and update the blockchain. To speed up the transaction, Mastercard will create a secondary wallet to store a plurality of account profiles, each profile including a fiat currency amount, blockchain currency amount, account identifier, and address.
Not only this, in this method the transaction message is formatted based on one or more standards and includes a plurality of data elements, including at least a data element reserved for private use including a specific address and a transaction amount; identifying, by a processing device, a specific account profile stored in the account database.
In the month of October 2018, Mastercard won a patent for a method to partition a blockchain. This would allow the introduction of various sorts of blockchains – including those that promote varied currencies. The patent illustrated the method of a blockchain proficient of “storing multiple transaction formats”. It asserted that this is essential because blockchains require that all actions be of a similar format and uniform size, which restricts efficiency.
The application of a partitioned blockchain may allow a single blockchain to collect transaction records for a majority of various blockchains, decreasing the deployment required for executing the majority of blockchains to the separate, partitioned blockchain. In addition, the partitioning of the transaction records in the blockchain may permit constraints on the access to the activity records due to the capacity for the records to be formatted separately in an individual partition. Not only this, a process for creation of blocks for a partitioned blockchain includes: storing at least one block in a memory of a processing server. This one block has a most newly added block and at least one or more transaction entries.
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