Outsource a computation and you face a quiet question: how do you know the server actually computed the right answer rather than a cheap, plausible-looking wrong one? Re-running the computation yourself defeats the purpose of outsourcing it. Verifiable computation is the cryptographic answer — the server returns the result plus a short proof that the result is correct, and checking the proof is far cheaper than redoing the work.
Lagrange Labs landed two related grants in 2025 in this space. US12368596B2, “Systems and methods for cryptography” (July 22, 2025), and US12400019B1, “Systems and methods for cryptographically verifying queries” (August 26, 2025). The inventor team includes Papamanthou and Srinivasan, names tied to serious academic work on verifiable computation and authenticated data structures.
The query-verification framing is the practically interesting one. Imagine a database where you do not run the server but still need to trust its answers — a blockchain state query, an outsourced analytics result. The patent claims producing a proof that a returned query result is exactly what the underlying data implies, so a light client can verify correctness without holding or scanning the whole dataset.
These proofs are typically succinct and rest on the zero-knowledge and SNARK machinery — short proofs that are fast to verify regardless of how large the underlying computation was. The CPC tags (H04L 9/3236 for hash-based mechanisms, H04L 9/50 for blockchain in the cryptography grant; data-protection codes in the query grant) point at that lineage. The value is the asymmetry: expensive to prove, trivial to check.
Per the desk's rules: these are issued grants (one B2, one B1), not applications, and they claim systems and methods, not shipped products — though Lagrange's work on verifiable computation for blockchain and data is the obvious context. The pairing of a general cryptography grant with a specific query-verification grant is a typical build-the-core-then-apply-it pattern.
For the reader watching the zero-knowledge frontier, query verifiability is where the abstract SNARK machinery meets a concrete, marketable need: in a world of outsourced and decentralized computation, being able to prove an answer is correct — cheaply, succinctly, without re-execution — is foundational. These grants stake out that ground.