Circle—the company behind USDC (the digital dollar used by millions worldwide for payments, savings, and international transfers)—just bought the blockchain patent library IBM spent more than a decade building.
The deal, announced July 27, hands Circle over 1,000 blockchain patents issued by IBM worldwide
Patents are legal rights that give the holder exclusive control over a specific invention. If you hold a patent on a method for processing transactions on a blockchain—the shared digital ledger where crypto activity is permanently recorded and can’t be altered—you get to decide who else uses it and on what terms. IBM had been building that kind of leverage since its mid-2010s enterprise blockchain push.
By December 2025, patent analytics firm PatSnap credited IBM with 790 U.S. blockchain patents—more than any other American company, with Bank of America a distant second at roughly 200. Circle, which received its first-ever patent in December 2023 (covering parallel blockchain data processing—a technique for verifying multiple groups of transactions simultaneously), went from essentially zero to the top of the U.S. rankings overnight. “The portfolio comprises over 680 patent families and nearly 1,000 issued patents worldwide, spanning foundational blockchain technology, banking, financial services, insurance, enterprise infrastructure, supply chain verification, and secure cloud operations,” Circle said in its official announcement. Circle plans to put them to work across its entire stack. “The expanded IP position directly supports Circle’s foundation for building the internet financial system, including USDC, Circle Payments Network, Arc, and a growing suite of onchain products and agentic financial tools,” the company added.