ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,417,491, issued on Sept. 16, was assigned to VERONA HOLDINGS SEZC (George Town, Cayman Islands).

"Token-based smart contract-managed decentralized lending processes having a distributed authentication stage" was invented by Lukasz Jakub Sliwka (Las Vegas), Jonathan Yantis (Grants Pass, Ore.) and William Edward Quigley (Pacific Palisades, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A loan process smart contract manages a collateralized loan process for a loan against a collateralized item, the collateralized loan process including tokenizing and locking a collateral token that tokenizes the collateral item, managing distributed authentication ...