On March 31, 2026, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Bank of America Corporation a patent, US12592824B2, titled “Secure apparatus to share and deploy machine build programs utilizing unique hash tokens.” The grant is unusual for a bank: it applies non-fungible tokens — the same primitive associated with digital collectibles — to an internal IT problem, namely controlling when and whether a piece of software is allowed to deploy. For a reader used to thinking of NFTs as a consumer-crypto artifact, the grant maps a different use: a token as a deployment key.

The disclosed method chains three tokens. A resource machine build-program is transformed into a first NFT and embedded on a flash drive; a second NFT, representing an ownership certificate for the build, is generated when the resource machine interacts with the drive; and a smart contract combines the two into a third NFT, whose creation is the trigger that activates and deploys the build. The abstract is explicit about the gating step:

generating a resultant integrated non-fungible token (NFT3) via a dynamic smart contract module, wherein NFT3 is generated by combining NFT1 and NFT2, and activating and deploying the resource machine build-program on the resource machine via a build activation module, wherein the activation is triggered by the generation of NFT3.— Secure apparatus to share and deploy machine build programs utilizing unique hash tokens, US12592824B2

The classifications track the mechanism. The grant carries the signature-protocol classes H04L 9/3213, H04L 9/3247, and H04L 9/3268 together with H04L 9/50, the blockchain-specific cryptography subclass. The deployment cannot proceed until the cryptographic combination of the build token and the ownership token resolves through the smart contract — a hard dependency between a token event and a software action.

A week with more than twenty BofA grants

The grant did not arrive alone. In the U.S. blockchain grant window of March 31 to April 6, 2026, the records indexed for the sector keyword set show Bank of America as the volume-leading named assignee, with the office issuing more than 20 of the bank's patents in that window — most of them security, fraud, and infrastructure grants that mention a ledger only in passing, but several reaching the on-chain layer directly. US12591889B2, “Blockchain-based source identifier,” uses a digital replication of a transaction blockchain to trace and map web-resource sources and build a schematic lineage; it carries G06Q 20/401 and H04L 9/50. US12591500B2 describes a batch-processing system whose AI-generated code snippets are “automatically evaluated against smart contracts stored in an enterprise organization's blockchain network” before deployment — a second grant, like the NFT build patent, that uses a smart contract as a gate on what software is allowed to run.

Read together, these issued claims describe a recurring theme inside the bank's drop: using ledger and smart-contract mechanisms not to move money but to control provenance and authorization in enterprise IT — which build deploys, which code passes, which source a transaction traces to. The NFT build grant is the most concrete expression of that theme, because the token chain is the literal gate.

Where the issued coverage sits

Bank of America's broader estate, like other large-bank portfolios, concentrates in security and machine-learning classes rather than payments-crypto; the week's BofA grants cluster in network-security classes such as H04L 63/1433 and H04L 63/1416 and in quantum/ML classes G06N 10/20 and G06N 10/60. Against that backdrop, the NFT build grant and the source-identifier grant stand out as the records where the bank sought and obtained coverage that turns on a token or a smart contract rather than a classifier. Of the grants in the window, H04L 9/50 — the blockchain subclass — was the single most common CPC class, appearing on 17 of them, which places the bank's on-chain grants inside the densest part of the week's classification pattern.

What the NFT build grant establishes is specific and bounded: an enforceable claim to a method that gates a software deployment on the cryptographic combination of a build token and an ownership token through a smart contract, owned by one of the largest banks in the United States. The record says nothing about whether the bank deploys software this way in production, how broadly the technique is used, or how the claim compares in scope to any rival's. Those questions the patent does not answer. What it does map is where Bank of America has now obtained coverage — at the intersection of NFTs, smart contracts, and enterprise deployment control — and the cluster of same-week grants applying ledger primitives to provenance and authorization rather than to payments.