Bank of America Files for Cryptocurrency Storage Patent

Bank of America, the second-largest U.S. bank by total assets, has filed a patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which was published Aug. 23.

The development is comparable to patents awarded to, or applied by, several multinational corporations, such as IBM, Wells Fargo and Intuit.

Filed last April, the patent, titled "Block Chain Encryption Tags," details a system that identifies the first entered data values to a block, subsequently denoting a "Creator tag" to such datasets and assigning them to a blockchain on a first-processed basis.

The patent indicates its application function as recording and storing digital transactions-mainly for enterprises and large-scale businesses.

Unlike most blockchain patents that focus on a sophisticated software process, BoA's patent calls for a hardware processor that encrypts all data before being validated on a block.

Interestingly, the system is a "Reproduced version" of a cryptocurrency patent filed in 2014 by James Ronca, titled "Cryptocurrency Online Vault Storage System."

Instead, the patent mechanism allows the bank to store all client assets in a single vault, courtesy of the point-of-data entry encryption.

BoA's patent includes a "Messaging" application that notifies users of a payment's success or unsuccess by calculating the validations from a "Number of miners" and comparing it with a prerequisite of minimum validations.

The elaborate patent is not the first for BoA. The bank currently has more than 50 blockchain and cryptocurrency-based patents in its arsenal, beating out technology rival IBM in this regard.

While the bank remains skeptical toward cryptocurrencies, it was awarded a digital asset exchange patent last December.