Circle Buys IBM Blockchain Patent Estate—And Becomes America's Biggest Holder

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. Arc is Circle’s own payment-focused blockchain built for institutional finance. The agentic tools are AI-powered software programs that can execute financial transactions autonomously—no human required for each step.

“Intellectual property is critical to advancing our mission and expanding adoption of onchain infrastructure,” said Sarah Wilson, Circle’s General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. “IBM has been a pioneer in technological innovation, and this acquisition expands Circle’s ability to advance the infrastructure that powers global, internet-native finance.”

Before this deal, Circle had joined the LOT Network—a coalition that shields members from lawsuits by patent trolls (firms that buy patents purely to extract settlement fees from other companies, without building anything themselves). With nearly 1,000 patents now in hand, Circle has enough IP to go on offense if it chooses. It hasn’t said whether it plans to.

IBM is also a confirmed partner in Open Standard, the consortium behind Open USD—a stablecoin (a cryptocurrency pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar) that launched June 30 with more than 140 backers, including Visa, Mastercard, Google, BlackRock, Stripe, and Coinbase. Open USD distributes reserve income directly to its partner distributors rather than keeping it—a model designed to undercut the revenue line Circle depends on.

IBM sold Circle its foundational blockchain IP while simultaneously backing the stablecoin built to eat USDC’s market share. CRCL shares rose 2.57% Monday after the announcement.