The patent awarded to Microsoft is for a system designed to combat the “difficult and cumbersome” process of minting and managing tokens.
According to documents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC. has been granted a patent for a “ledger-independent token service.” The invention has been credited to the team of Gregory Philip Cignavitch, John Marley Gray, Spuria Madhuram, and Nayana Singh Patel.
The grant issued details that the patent will allow Microsoft to build a system that will aid in the creation and trading of tokens spanning multiple networks. Templates will also be available to users for the creation of tokens. Each of these templates will be tied to a physical or digital asset and “defines a set of one or more attributes and one or more control functions associated with the type.”
The abstract goes on to say that the system can then receive “a selection of a token template in the one or more token templates and create the token on the distributed ledger network, where the created token includes the set of one or more attributes and one or more control functions defined in the selected token template. “The basic idea behind the ledger independent token service is that it will serve as a shared interface when trying to trade tokens across different ledger networks.
Microsoft working toward solving blockchain hurdles
Standardizing the tokenization of physical and digital assets is another issue Microsoft hopes to tackle. The filing states that there is “little to no standardization across distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) in terms of the mechanisms provided to manage the lifecycle of tokens.
Microsoft uses the example of Ethereum requiring different tools to create and interact with tokens on its network while Hyperledger Fabric requires different tools to do the same job on a different network. “This makes it cumbersome to build applications that involve multi-ledger token transactions,” says Microsoft. The filing states this is due to applications needing to implement the correct code for connecting with each DLT, “as well as build token-related business logic that applies to multiple different DLTs.”
Microsoft says its ledger-independent token service will address these problems, among others. To accomplish this, Microsoft will provide a common interface for transacting with and managing all tokens across all networks and platforms in addition to the mechanism for standardizing tokenization.
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