Consensus is the part of a blockchain where the engineering and the marketing diverge most. Proof of Work burns electricity; Proof of Stake concentrates influence with capital. A patent that claims to replace both is, on its face, exactly the kind of grand promise this beat is paid to read skeptically. US12,640,947, granted to Bank of America Corporation on May 26, 2026, makes that promise — so the right move is to ignore the framing and read what claim 1 actually recites.

The abstract sets the ambition plainly, and the verbatim language is worth pinning down before parsing the mechanism.

Systems and methods are disclosed to revolutionize blockchain consensus mechanisms by introducing a novel, inclusive framework that enhances efficiency, scalability, and environmental sustainability.

“Revolutionize” is a press-release verb, not a claim limitation, so set it aside. The substance lives in three recited pieces. First, a cluster-based scoring system: nodes participate based on merit, determined through an iterative scoring process within clusters. Second, multi-queue dynamic scheduling, which adjusts mining complexity as the blockchain evolves. Third — and this is the limitation that does the most distinguishing work — cooldown periods that prevent dominance by any single node, with the claim reciting continuous engagement within the consensus mechanism and adaptation of the consensus process to network growth.

Read structurally, the design is trying to swap the basis of participation. In Proof of Work, you participate by spending hashpower; in Proof of Stake, by locking capital. Here, you participate by accumulating a score through an iterative, cluster-local process — merit, in the patent's framing — and the cooldown periods exist precisely to stop a high-scoring node from monopolizing block production the way a large miner or large staker can. The scope of the claim is that scored-cluster-plus-cooldown machinery, with the multi-queue scheduler adjusting difficulty over time.

What it does not cover is broad and worth stating, because consensus is a field where overclaiming is rampant. This is not a fence around “alternatives to PoW/PoS,” nor around reputation-based or merit-based consensus as a concept — prior art in that space is extensive, from delegated and proof-of-authority schemes to assorted reputation systems. The grant reads on this particular combination: iterative cluster scoring, multi-queue dynamic scheduling, and cooldown-based anti-dominance. A competing merit-weighted consensus that scores globally rather than in clusters, or that throttles dominance by some mechanism other than cooldown periods, has room to operate outside the recited claim.

The CPC classification is striking for its economy: a single code, H04L 9/50, the blockchain-specific cryptography class. A lone-CPC grant is a small signal in itself — it suggests a tightly scoped, blockchain-native filing rather than something straddling payments (G06Q) or general security (G06F 21). The claim is about chain mechanics, full stop.

It is worth weighing the cooldown limitation, because it is the cleverest and the most limiting piece at once. Anti-dominance is the hard problem in any merit- or reputation-weighted consensus: the moment you reward a node for good behavior with more influence, you create a flywheel where the strongest node gets stronger, recreating the centralization that PoS critics complain about. A cooldown period — barring a node that just produced a block from immediately producing the next — is a structural brake on that flywheel. As a claim limitation it is precise and easy to design around: a competitor could throttle dominance with stake-decay, randomized leader election, or committee rotation instead, none of which is a cooldown. So the very feature that makes the design interesting also draws a sharp, avoidable boundary around it.

The multi-queue dynamic scheduling deserves a similar caveat. Adjusting mining complexity as the chain evolves is, in the abstract, what every difficulty-adjustment algorithm does; Bitcoin retargets, and PoS systems tune issuance. What the claim recites is doing it through a multi-queue scheduler tied to the cluster-scoring framework. Strip the scoring and the cooldown away and you are left with difficulty adjustment, which is not novel. So the three pieces have to be read together — scored clusters, multi-queue scheduling, cooldown anti-dominance — as a single combination claim. Pulling any one out and asking whether it is patentable on its own misreads how the grant is constructed.

The assignee is the genuinely notable part. Bank of America patenting a from-scratch consensus mechanism is a data point about how a major bank is thinking past public-chain primitives toward consensus it could run and govern itself — efficiency and “environmental sustainability” being exactly the language an institution uses when it wants the benefits of a ledger without the energy optics of Proof of Work. The inventors named — Saravanan Balasubramanian, Shouryan Sharma, and Sharmishtha Kant — are working core protocol design inside a bank, which is itself the headline.

The disciplined verdict: the grant is real and the mechanism is concrete, but the abstract's “revolutionize” should be treated as ambition, not scope. What Bank of America actually owns here is a specific scored-cluster consensus with cooldown anti-dominance and multi-queue scheduling — useful to know precisely because so much consensus IP is written to sound broader than it is. Read claim 1 before crediting the bigger claim; the canonical record is deep-linked above.