ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 10 -- United States Patent no. 12,293,252, issued on May 6, was assigned to ZHONGCHAO SPECIAL SECURITY TECHNOLOGY Co. LTD (Beijing) and CHINA BANKNOTE PRINTING AND MINTING CORP. (Beijing).

"Encoding element and anti-counterfeiting product" was invented by Kai Sun (Beijing) and Dong Yang (Beijing).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An encoding element and an anti-counterfeiting product. The encoding element includes a printing stock, wherein the printing stock has an encoding area thereon; the encoding area is provided with at least one group of markers, and at least one of the attributes of markers in the same group is the same; and the markers are randomly distributed, such ...