IBM Patents A System That Creates Audited Blockchain ‘Checkpoints’

Aside from Mastercard who recently won a patent about coupons and their use online, IBM has also won two patents for a system that verifies the integrity of a blockchain. The system developed by IBM will certify that the blockchain has passed certain audit requirements in particular periods of time.

Both of the IBM patents in regards to this were approved on May 31 and are related to describing the certified and audit-able “checkpoints”. Their main goal is to allow businesses to satisfy the regulations for data verification and retention when they are connected to the network.

Understanding the Blockchain Based Checkpoints System

As such, the first patent is based on a single point of a checkpoint and what constitutes it, according to IBM. Here, the requirement is that all peers and nodes that perform validation should achieve consensus about the validity of the blockchain at the time of the snapshot.

According to the summary found in the first patent’s information:

“Before a checkpoint is certified, it must be consistent, meaning that all validating peers must reach the same state (value) for the checkpoint. Preferably, the checkpoint is a compression of the current blockchain world state into a compact representation (e.g., a hash value) of the ledger that is consistent across the (validating) peers.”

Obviously, the idea is for the audit to go back to the Genesis block and work its way up from there. This has been done to make sure that the immutability and consensus are kept in tact up to the point in time that is being certified.

When it comes to the second patent, it actually builds on the first but with the description of how each checkpoint can be audited. In this patent, IBM implements and patents a process that audits the checkpoints – where businesses can also refer back to any certified checkpoint and reconcile data from the blockchain.

As the summary from the second patent says:

“To have a certifiably-auditable blockchain, an auditor should be able to rerun the transactions between checkpoints and then compare the value of the latter checkpoint with the value recorded in the ledger. The first step in this auditing process is to double check the hashes of all the blocks in the chain. To be thorough, the signatures on all transactions should be checked, although the hashes on all blocks ought to be sufficient.”

As we can all see, IBM is focused on products and services for enterprise-level businesses that run on the blockchain. As a true innovator, IBM is focused on blockchain scaling, auditing and supply chain management.