On May 26, 2026, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued American Express Travel Related Services Company a patent, US12640925B2, titled “Verified presentation of non-fungible tokens.” The claim is narrow and procedural: before a device displays the media a non-fungible token points to, the system calls a function of the token's smart contract to obtain the owner address, validates that owner, and only then presents the media file. For a card network whose disclosures to investors are built around payments, fraud control, and a large loyalty franchise, the grant is a marker of where some of those competencies are being rebuilt on a blockchain substrate.

The mechanism, as the abstract describes it, runs through the contract rather than around it:

The presentation device can then execute a function of a smart contract located at the smart contract address to obtain the owner address for the NFT, wherein the NFT identifier is provided as an argument to the function of the smart contract.— Verified presentation of non-fungible tokens, US12640925B2

In business terms, this is an authentication step for digital goods: proving a token's holder is who they claim before unlocking what the token represents. The record carries CPC classes including H04L 9/3213 (token-based authentication), H04L 9/0825 (public-key protocols), and H04L 9/50, the blockchain-specific subclass — the same authentication-and-blockchain pairing that recurs across the company's on-chain filings. The sole named inventor, Andras L. Ferenczi, appears repeatedly across Amex's blockchain grants, which is a factual indicator of a sustained internal engineering line rather than a one-off.

An on-chain estate built on loyalty and payment rails

The footprint behind the grant is substantial. Across the records indexed for American Express on the sector keyword set, the company's blockchain-tagged grants number 47, and they cluster in a recognizable set of classes: H04L 9/50 (16 grants), H04L 9/3239 (hash-based protocols, 15), G06Q 20/3829 (secured payment involving key/credential management, 13), and H04L 9/0637 (block-cipher modes, 12). That distribution describes a payments-and-loyalty company porting its core functions onto distributed ledgers.

The loyalty line is the densest. US12561712B2 covers loyalty-point distribution using a decentralized loyalty ID, writing customer rewards to a blockchain keyed to a public key; US12395362B2 covers transferring reward points between loyalty programs through encrypted messages written to a blockchain node; and US12229794B2 covers a blockchain-based loyalty-point system driven by smart contracts. A second line covers payment settlement itself: US12423696B2 (transaction authorization using blockchain and merchant/user public keys), US12450600B2 (blockchain-based proof of payment for connected devices), and US12340374B2 (blockchain-based payment networks bridging digital and fiat balances).

A third line reaches into central-bank digital currency. US12591874B2 covers CBDC-facilitated micropayments, splitting a purchase amount across multiple payee wallet addresses and generating a signed CBDC transfer for each. Read together, the loyalty, payment, and CBDC lines describe the same firm extending three of its established businesses — rewards, transaction processing, and cross-border settlement — into an on-chain form, with the new NFT-verification grant adding an ownership-authentication primitive that any of those lines could draw on when the asset being moved is a token rather than a balance.

The estate is also broader than payments and rewards alone. US12561675B2 covers relationship verification using decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials obtained from a blockchain, and US12457265B2 covers a shared blockchain that lets partner institutions collaborate in collecting customer information through decentralized identifiers. Those identity-and-credential grants share inventors and vocabulary with the loyalty and payment lines, and they sit naturally beside the new NFT-verification claim: each is, at bottom, about establishing on a ledger who is who, or who owns what, before an action proceeds. The throughline across the footprint is authentication — of a payer, a loyalty member, a credential holder, or now a token owner — rendered through smart contracts and public keys. The grant counts and shared CPC classes are what support that reading; the company's product roadmap is not disclosed in the records and is not the basis for it.

Where the grant sits in a thin week

Blockchain grant volume is lower than in patent-dense sectors, and the U.S. blockchain grant window of May 26 to June 1, 2026 was notably thin — the records indexed for the sector keyword set number 19 issued patents, against 42 in the following week. American Express is one of the recognizable financial names in that sparse drop, alongside grants to EYGS (US12639705B2), covering provable backup confirmation for digital wallets using key shards, and Ava Labs (US12640946B2), covering customized blockchain infrastructure. The presence of a card network in that week alongside an audit firm and a protocol developer is a factual indicator of how broad the assignee base at the token-mechanics layer has become.

What the new grant establishes is bounded and specific: an enforceable claim to a smart-contract-mediated NFT ownership-verification step, owned by one of the largest card networks in the world, added to an on-chain estate already concentrated in loyalty and payment authorization. The record says nothing about whether American Express ships NFT-gated experiences, how its loyalty volumes compare to rivals, or how broadly the claim reads against any competitor's products — those questions sit outside what a patent resolves. What it does map is the shape of the estate the company has accumulated, classification by classification and grant by grant: a payments-and-rewards franchise that has been quietly translating its core mechanics onto distributed ledgers, and has now added the piece that authenticates who owns the token before the token does anything.