(12)Market specification (10)Doc. No. BP 2026/0001 A1 (43)Rev. Oct. 5, 2026

Granted or abandoned.

(54) Method and system for trading the outcome of patent examination

(57) Every United States patent application ends one of two ways. The office grants it, or the applicant lets it go abandoned. BlueprintCoin opens a market on each published application, GRANT against ABANDON, and settles it from the status code in the patent office's own public file. No committee votes on the result and no admin key decides it.

(21): 12 markets open sample
(22): 2 settled from the record
(51): Int. Cl. G06Q 40/04, trading and exchanges
(58): Source of record: USPTO Open Data Portal
(73): Settles on Solana
(74): Token $BLUEPRINT, on pump.fun

$BLUEPRINT · contract address

Contract address coming soon!

Docket excerpt

What a market looks like.

Five example applications. The pill is the office's own status wording. The bar is the market's price. Live markets open when the market program ships.

Appl. No.	Title	Office status	Market price

Examination

Run an application through the office.

This is the path a real application takes, with the office's status wording on each box. Advance it one action at a time and watch the market reprice. Select any box to read what the office means by it and what the market does.

Boxes are office statuses. Double borders are the two endings. Transition weights are illustrative, not office statistics.

Application

GRANT ABANDON

From here

The archive

How long the office has taken, drawn to scale.

Ten real patents, from filing to grant. Bell waited three weeks. Hyatt's microprocessor claim took almost twenty years through a chain of continuations, and he is still in court: in March 2026 he asked the Supreme Court to review how long an applicant may keep a filing alive.

Dates from the patents themselves, via Google Patents. Selden and Hyatt are the reason rule R4 exists: a parent going abandoned is not always the end of the story.

The token

(74) Protocol token

$BLUEPRINT is burned by the trading it enables.

Every trade pays a 1% fee. Two fifths of it buys $BLUEPRINT on the open market and burns it. The office has a phrase for giving something up for good: dedicated to the public.

CAContract address coming soon!

Buy $BLUEPRINT on pump.fun

Where the 1% goes

40%buys and burns $BLUEPRINT
30%to whoever filed the market, for as long as it trades
20%to the readers who attest each status from the office record
10%to the dispute fund that covers a wrong reading

The docket

Example markets, one per published application. Filter by the office's Technology Center, by where the application stands, or by market type. Select a row to open its file wrapper.

Search title, applicant or number

Technology Center

Stage

Market type

Appl. No.	Title · applicant	TC · art unit	Type	Office status · clock	Market price	Volume, SOL

(54)

Method and system for trading the outcome of patent examination

The full design, written the way a patent is written: numbered paragraphs, tables, claims, and at the end the examiner's objections. The red notes in the margin are ours.

Field

[0001]This specification describes a protocol for trading the outcome of patent examination. The token comes first. The market program described here is in development.

Background

[0002]A United States utility application is examined in public. Under 35 U.S.C. 122(b) most applications publish 18 months after their earliest filing date. From then on the whole file is open to anyone: every rejection, every amendment, every fee paid.

[0003]The office records where each application stands as a numbered status. Code 30 is “Docketed New Case - Ready for Examination”. Code 41 is “Non Final Action Mailed”. Code 150 is “Patented Case”. Code 161 is “Abandoned -- Failure to Respond to an Office Action”. The office serves these, free, through its Open Data Portal at api.uspto.gov.

[0004]The queue is long. The office counted 776,995 unexamined applications on April 6, 2026, down from a peak of 837,928 in January 2025. Practitioner summaries of office data put the wait for a first action at about 20 months and the whole process at roughly two years.

[0005]Every step costs the applicant money. Filing, search and examination come to $2,000. The issue fee is $1,290. A first request for continued examination is $1,500 and each one after is $2,860. Small entities pay 40% of these amounts and micro entities pay 20%. Table 3 has the schedule.

[0006]So each pending application carries a public, dated, two-way question with real money behind it. Nothing prices it.

True, and there may be a reason nobody has. See the Office Action.

Summary

[0007]BlueprintCoin opens a market on one published application at a time. Two tokens trade against each other, GRANT and ABANDON. A matched pair always redeems for one unit of collateral. When the office records an ending, one token pays 1 and the other pays 0.

[0008]The settlement input is the status code and the transaction history in the office's public file. No person at BlueprintCoin decides an outcome.

Brief description of the drawings

[0009]The index sheet carries three drawings: how a market settles, the examination as a state diagram, and the pendency of ten historical patents drawn to scale. The build sheet shows the system as it would be deployed.

Detailed description

[0010]Market types. A final disposition market stays open until the office records a patent or an abandonment. A first action market asks one question, allowed or rejected on the first office action, and resolves when the first action is mailed. A Track One market covers applications in prioritized examination under 37 CFR 1.102(e), where the office's stated goal is a final disposition within twelve months. It resolves at month twelve. Track One cases often finish before they publish, so only applications that are already public, mostly continuations, can carry one.

Track One is a small pond. Most of these are invisible until they issue.

[0011]Source of record. Readers call three Open Data Portal endpoints for each open market: /meta-data for the status code, /transactions for the dated history, and /continuity for parent and child applications. Paths are on the build sheet.

[0012]Reading rule. A status is accepted on chain when three of five independent readers attest the same application number, status code and latest transaction date.

Who are the five? Unanswered. See the build sheet.

[0013]R1, mail-date halt. When a new office action appears in the record, trading pauses for ten minutes. Everyone gets to see the record before anyone trades on it.

[0014]R2, reply clock. A rejection starts a three-month period to reply. The applicant can buy extensions up to six months, which is the limit set by 35 U.S.C. 133. The market page counts it down.

[0015]R3, reopening is not an ending. A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114 and a notice of appeal under 35 U.S.C. 134 both keep the market open.

[0016]R4, continuation carry. Applicants often abandon a parent on purpose after filing a continuation with the same priority date. If the continuity record shows a child filed before the abandonment, the market carries to the child. Every market also has a sunset ten years after the parent's filing date. If no patent has issued in the family by then, ABANDON pays.

Without the sunset this never ends. Selden: 16 years. Hyatt: 19.

[0017]R5, allowance is not grant. A notice of allowance gives the applicant three months to pay the issue fee, and that period cannot be extended. GRANT pays only at status 150.

[0018]R6, third-party submissions. 35 U.S.C. 122(e) lets any member of the public send prior art to the examiner while a window is open. The market page shows whether the window is open. A holder of ABANDON may lawfully use it.

So traders can push the result. Lawful, but say it loudly.

[0019]Fees. Each trade pays 1%, split as in Table 1. Burned $BLUEPRINT is treated as dedicated to the public.

Table 1 · Where the trading fee goes
Share	Recipient	Why
40%	Buy and burn $BLUEPRINT	Ties the token to trading volume and nothing else.
30%	Market filer	Pays people to find applications worth trading.
20%	Readers	Pays for polling the office and attesting statuses.
10%	Dispute fund	Makes traders whole if a reading is later shown wrong.

[0020]Filer bond. The bond follows the office's discount ladder, as in Table 2. It returns at settlement. It is lost if the application was not eligible when the market was filed.

Table 2 · Filer tiers
Tier	Who	Bond	Mirrors
Micro	A wallet's first three markets	1 SOL	USPTO micro entity, 80% off
Small	Fewer than 25 markets filed	2 SOL	USPTO small entity, 60% off
Undiscounted	Everyone else	5 SOL	Full fee

Table 3 · What the applicant pays the office (real, in US dollars)
Fee	Undiscounted	Small	Micro
Filing, search and examination	2,000	800	400
Issue fee	1,290	516	258
Continued examination, first request	1,500	600	300
Continued examination, each later request	2,860	1,144	572
Notice of appeal	905	362	181
Prioritized examination, Track One	4,515	1,806	903
Maintenance at 3.5 years	2,150	860	430
Maintenance at 7.5 years	4,040	1,616	808
Maintenance at 11.5 years	8,280	3,312	1,656

USPTO fee schedule, effective January 19, 2025, last revised August 14, 2026.

Continuations

[0021]The roadmap is named the way the office names follow-on filings. A continuation, CON, builds on what is already disclosed. A continuation-in-part, CIP, adds new matter. The two CIPs below are ideas, not commitments.

CON-1Phase I

First disposition

The first market is filed, the first status is attested by three of five readers, and the first settlement pays from the record.

CON-2Phase II

Art-unit indices

Baskets by Technology Center and art unit, priced from the office's Patent Examination Research Dataset. One token for every pending case in software, one for biotech.

CIP-3Speculative

Maintenance markets

A granted patent stays alive only if its owner pays at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years. Miss a payment and the office records status 250, expired for nonpayment. Markets on which patents their owners keep paying for.

CIP-4Lore

The standing office

The same portal serves the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's dockets. Markets on whether the Board agrees to review an issued patent, and whether its claims survive. Every claim in force in the United States, carrying a live price.

Claims

What is claimed is:

A method of settling a market, comprising: (a) receiving an application number for a published United States patent application; (b) minting a first token and a second token that together redeem for one unit of collateral; (c) reading a status code for the application from a public record kept by the patent office; (d) pausing trading for a fixed period when the record shows a new office action; (e) paying the first token when the status code indicates a patented case; and (f) paying the second token when the status code indicates abandonment and a continuity record shows no child application.
The method of claim 1, wherein the reading is accepted only when at least three of five independent readers attest the same status code.
The method of claim 1, further comprising carrying the market to a child application named in the continuity record.
The method of claim 1, wherein a fee on each trade buys and destroys a protocol token.
The method of claim 4, wherein a filer of the market receives a share of the fee.
The method of claim 1, wherein the market expires ten years after the filing date of the application.
A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing instructions that, when executed, perform the method of claim 1.

Claim 7 is a joke for patent lawyers. They will get it.

Office action

Rejected

Claims 1 to 7 are rejected

Examiner: us. Art unit: none. These are the grounds we would raise against our own design.

The applicant controls one of the two outcomes.Abandonment is a choice. An applicant, or its attorney, can buy ABANDON and then stop replying. Position caps per wallet and the cost of throwing away a valuable filing limit this. They do not remove it.
The market can move the result.Under 35 U.S.C. 122(e) anyone may send prior art to the examiner. A trader who holds ABANDON has a paid reason to go looking for it. That is lawful and arguably useful, but it means the price is not a neutral forecast.
One source of record.Settlement depends on one agency's interface. It needs an API key, and the office has already moved one public service, PatentsView, onto the new portal. Five readers do not help if all five read the same broken endpoint.
Not every application is visible.An applicant who files only in the United States can ask that the application not be published. Markets can exist only on what the office has published.
Money is locked for years.A final disposition market can run past two years, longer with appeals and continuations. The ten-year sunset is a backstop, not a comfort.
The law.Contracts that pay on a real-world event are regulated in most places, the United States included. This document is not legal advice.
Still in development.The market program is not audited or deployed yet, and every market on this site is a sample.

Sources

USPTO fee schedule: uspto.gov, fee schedule
Unexamined inventory, April 6, 2026: uspto.gov, news release
Open Data Portal: data.uspto.gov
Status codes: USPTO PatEx documentation, Appendix A
Pendency estimates: Thompson Patent Law, 2026 overview
Hyatt petition No. 25-1049: Patently-O, March 2026

What it takes to make this real.

For the developers. This page is the front end with a mock data layer. Below is the system behind it: the office endpoints, the status mapping, the on-chain accounts, and the six functions to replace.

AOffice recordUSPTO Open Data Portal. Free, keyed, read-only.

BReadersFive independent keepers poll each open market and sign what they read.

CAttestationThree matching signatures become one post_status call.

DMarket programSolana program. Holds collateral, mints the pair, halts, carries, settles.

EThis siteReads program accounts and an indexer. Never calls the office directly.

Office endpoints

Base https://api.uspto.gov. Send the key in an X-API-Key header. Paths matched against two open-source portal clients on Oct. 5, 2026. Confirm each in the portal's Swagger before coding, and read the rate limits there: they are not restated here.

Call	Used for	Cadence
`GET /api/v1/patent/applications/search`	Find an application when someone files a market. Docket search.	On demand
`GET /api/v1/patent/applications/{applicationNumberText}/meta-data`	Status code and text, filing date, art unit, examiner, entity status, publication number.	Every 6 hours per open market
`GET …/{applicationNumberText}/transactions`	Dated event history. A new office action starts the halt and the reply clock.	With every status read
`GET …/{applicationNumberText}/continuity`	Parent and child applications. Decides carry or settle on abandonment.	On any abandonment code
`GET …/{applicationNumberText}/documents`	Link each event to the office's own PDF.	On new transactions
`GET /api/v1/patent/status-codes`	The status vocabulary. Match on description text.	Daily

Status to market action

Code	Office wording	Market action	Checked
19	Application Undergoing Preexam Processing	Not eligible yet	yes
30	Docketed New Case - Ready for Examination	Open. Also the status after a request for continued examination.	yes
41	Non Final Action Mailed	Halt 10 min. Start reply clock. First-action market resolves REJECTED.	yes
71	Response to Non-Final Office Action Entered and Forwarded to Examiner	Stop reply clock.	confirm
61	Final Rejection Mailed	Halt 10 min. Start reply clock.	confirm
120	Notice of Appeal Filed	Stay open.	confirm
93	Notice of Allowance Mailed -- Application Received in Office of Publications	Halt 10 min. Start 3-month issue-fee clock. First-action market resolves ALLOWED if this is the first action.	confirm
150	Patented Case	Settle GRANT.	yes
161	Abandoned -- Failure to Respond to an Office Action	Read continuity. Carry to a child, or settle ABANDON.	yes
163	Abandoned -- Failure to Pay Issue Fee	Same as 161.	confirm
166	Abandoned -- File-Wrapper-Continuation Parent Application	Carry.	yes
250	Patent Expired Due to NonPayment of Maintenance Fees Under 37 CFR 1.362	Reserved for maintenance markets, CIP-3.	yes

“Yes” means the code and wording were matched against the USPTO's published PatEx documentation. For “confirm” rows, do not hardcode the number: pull /status-codes and match on the wording. The office lists 225 codes. Any code not mapped here should leave the market open and raise an alert.

Program and keeper

Market account

Market  PDA ["market", application_number, kind]
  application_number  [u8; 8]    "19204318"
  kind                u8         0 final · 1 first action · 2 track one
  status_code         u16
  last_txn_date       i64
  halted_until        i64        R1
  reply_deadline      i64        R2
  carries             u8         R4
  sunset              i64        filing date + 10 years
  grant_mint          Pubkey
  abandon_mint        Pubkey
  collateral_vault    Pubkey
  filer               Pubkey
  filer_tier          u8
  bond                u64
  state               Open | Halted | Settled(Grant | Abandon)

Instructions
  file_market(application_number, kind, tier, seed)
  mint_set(amount) / redeem_set(amount)
  swap(side, amount_in, min_out)
  post_status(code, txn_code, txn_date, sigs[3..5])
  carry(child_application_number, sigs[3..5])
  settle()
  claim()
  collect_fees()

Reader loop

every 6h, for each market where state != Settled:
  meta = GET /applications/{n}/meta-data
  txns = GET /applications/{n}/transactions
  if meta.status_code == market.status_code
     and latest(txns).date == market.last_txn_date:
       continue

  sign({n, meta.status_code, latest(txns)})
  when 3 of 5 signatures match:
    post_status(...)            // sets halt + clocks

  if status is an abandonment code:
    kids = GET /applications/{n}/continuity
    child = first child filed before the abandonment
    if child: carry(child)
    else: settle()              // ABANDON pays

  if status == 150: settle()    // GRANT pays
  if now > market.sunset: settle()

Pricing

Constant-product pool over the GRANT and ABANDON reserves. Price of GRANT is the ABANDON reserve divided by the sum of both.
A buy mints complete sets with the collateral, then swaps the unwanted side into the pool. The ticket on sheet 3 runs this exact maths in the browser.

Front-end handoff

Replace these six functions

BP.api
  listMarkets(filters)        → Market[]
  getMarket(applicationNo)    → Market
  getHistory(applicationNo)   → {month, price, event?}[]
  lookupApplication(no)       → office meta-data, via your indexer
  quote(no, side, sol)        → {shares, avg, fee, after}
  submitOrder(no, side, sol)  → signature

Every number on this site comes through that object. It is defined once near the top of the page script. Wire it to the program and the indexer and nothing else on the page has to change.

Simulated on this site

All fourteen markets. Applicants, numbers, prices and volumes are invented.
Price movement. A timer nudges sample prices so the tables feel live.
The office response on sheet 4. It is shaped like a portal response. The page never calls the office.
Transition weights in the examination diagram. Replace with per-art-unit history from the PatEx dataset.
Orders. “Preview order” prints a receipt. No wallet is connected and nothing is signed.

Open questions for the team

Who runs the five readers, and what do they lose for a wrong signature?
Per-wallet position caps: what size makes it not worth an applicant's while to trade its own abandonment?
Which jurisdictions can use this at all?