Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has acquired IBM’s blockchain patent portfolio, a transaction aimed at strengthening its enterprise blockchain capabilities and protecting its expanding digital asset ecosystem. The acquisition makes Circle the top U.S. holder of blockchain patents.

USDC is used across crypto markets and payments infrastructure, making reliability, throughput, and legal certainty important parts of Circle’s broader technology position. Patent portfolios do not by themselves determine product adoption, but they can give companies more room to operate, defend core systems, and negotiate with partners in sectors where enterprise blockchain deployments intersect with financial services.

What Circle is acquiring

IBM has been among the world’s most active filers of blockchain-related patents. In its peak filing years of 2018 and 2019, the technology company filed more than 500 blockchain patents, creating a broad intellectual property portfolio covering areas such as consensus mechanisms and enterprise supply chain applications.

That portfolio has now been acquired by Circle. The financial terms of the transaction have not been publicly disclosed.

Circle had already been building its own blockchain intellectual property position. In December 2023, the company was granted a patent for parallel block processing, a technology intended to improve transaction throughput by allowing multiple blocks to be processed at the same time.

Defensive patent strategy

Circle has also taken steps to address the risk of patent litigation. The company joined the LOT Network, a collaborative defensive patent initiative, in both 2023 and 2025. The LOT Network includes more than 3.8 million patents across more than 2,800 members, and both Circle and IBM are members.

The network operates as a mutual defense arrangement. If a member’s patents are transferred to a patent assertion entity, often referred to as a patent troll, other members automatically receive licenses to those patents. That structure is designed to reduce litigation exposure without preventing members from owning, using, or licensing patents in ordinary business contexts.

IBM’s blockchain patent activity

IBM’s blockchain strategy has included several intellectual property initiatives. One example is its partnership with IPwe, launched in early 2021, which explored tokenizing corporate patents as NFTs on blockchain networks. The effort sought to represent intellectual property as tradeable digital assets.

The acquisition adds a major legacy technology portfolio to a digital asset company at a time when stablecoin issuers are expanding beyond token issuance into payments, settlement, and enterprise infrastructure. Details that remain undisclosed include the transaction value and how Circle plans to apply or license the acquired patents.