ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,354,129, issued on July 8, was assigned to Maplebear Inc. (San Francisco).

"Default allocation of credits to an order based on predicted credit expirations" was invented by Joseph Olivier (San Bruno, Calif.), Amritansh Tripathi (Fremont, Calif.), Eric Cumalander (Denver), Kaipeng Wu (San Jose, Calif.), Lukasz Czekaj (North Las Vegas, Nev.) and Joshua Beckwith (Lowell, Ind.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An online system displays an ordering interface and, responsive to receiving a request from a client device associated with a user to place an order, retrieves information describing a set of unused credits provided to the user by each of ...