This week, Circle earned its first patent for Parallel Block Processing in Blockchains – an innovative new technique, developed by Marcus Boorstin, Director of Engineering, that allows for simultaneous processing of multiple pieces of information – while still serially validating the blocks.
“Circle first used Parallel Block Processing to process transactions for USDC on Solana, which has significantly higher-throughput than Ethereum,” said Boorstin. “Several of Circle’s products, including Circle Mint, must process on-chain information in order to register incoming deposits and outgoing withdrawals. The blockchain nodes to which our applications connect are sometimes slow and unreliable – so it can be difficult to process blockchain data quickly enough to keep up with the chain.”
Boorstin noted that 'parallelism', a common technique in software engineering, is about processing multiple pieces of information at once – but challenging when one block depends on the previous block.
“Circle’s invention provides a technique for processing blockchain data in a parallel manner, while still serially validating all the blocks,” Boorstin said.
Jeff Tang, Circle’s Chief Intellectual Property Counsel, heralds the win as a major milestone for Circle.
“Marcus’s invention couldn’t come at a better time as we gain traction on Solana,” said Tang. “Patents act as a receipt of innovation and are a reflection of the hard and novel work done by our developers everyday. This patent will help protect our open architecture and grants us freedom to operate. I’m excited for new innovations to come in 2024.”
View the full details of the patent here.
