Mastercard Wins Patent for Partitioned, Multi-Currency Blockchain

Mastercard, an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in New York, United States has 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.

Mastercard’s newest patent, which was granted on October 9, 2018 by USPTO and first submitted in July 2016, describes the problem of requiring to stock various sorts of events on a separate platform. An “entity” aspiring to handle many types of blockchains for controlling numerous distinct currencies might require to drive multiple blockchain platforms, demanding more computer power.

The patent says

There is a need for a technological solution to provide a partitioned blockchain that is capable of storing multiple transaction formats and types in a single blockchain, reducing the computing resources and processing power required for deployment and operation of the blockchain, while also providing for enhanced usage of permissions for permissioned blockchains.

The patent illustrates the method of a blockchain proficient of “storing multiple transaction formats”. It asserts that this is essential because blockchains require that all actions be of a similar format and uniform size, which restricts efficiency.

Summary of Mastercard’s Patent

The patent gives a classification of systems and techniques for formation of blocks for a partitioned blockchain. 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. It will also have a collecting agent of the processing server and one transaction data entry for each of a majority of subnets. This will generate a hashing module of the processing server. After that, a hash value by using an application of one or more hashing algorithms to at least the header included in the most newly added block will produce a module of the processing server.

The document further explained that

A partitioned blockchain may include transaction records for three different subnets, where the transaction records associated with each respective subnet may be formatted differently and may involve the transfer of a different cryptographic currency as associated with each subnet.

The document further elaborated that transaction records may be customized based on the interpretation correlated with an analogous subnet. Interpretation may add practices or other data concerning the formatting and method of transaction accounts. For example, the semantics for a subnet may have rules about data in a transaction record, the organization of the data, the size of each data value, and the hashing algorithms used in the formulation of the subnet’s merkle root.

For example, subnet semantics may demand that a transaction record includes a timestamp of 4 bytes, a transaction amount of 16 bytes, a source address of 16 bytes with an identical signature of 32 bytes, a number of targets of 4 bytes, and, for each of the number of destinations, a target address of 16 bytes with an identical signature of 32 bytes. It may also demand a particular hashing algorithm, such as a double hash using the SHA-256 algorithm, for creating merkle roots for the subnet.

This is not the first time Mastercard has won a patent related to blockchain or cryptocurrency. In the month of July 2018, Mastercard won a patent for speeding up cryptocurrency transactions. A document released on July 17 by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) explained MasterCard’s latest patent as a “Method and system for linkage of blockchain-based assets to fiat currency accounts”.

To speed up the transaction, Mastercard is trying to create a secondary wallet to store a majority of account profiles, each profile having a fiat currency amount, blockchain currency amount, account identifier, and address.

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