Secure multiparty computation has spent years as a collection of protocols in the cryptography literature. The interesting shift in recent filings is the move from protocol to platform — from “here is a clever way for two parties to compute a function” to “here is a system that an enterprise can actually run to do this at scale.” That shift is where a technology stops being a research result and becomes infrastructure.
US12210636B2, “System and method for multiparty secure computing platform,” granted to Royal Bank of Canada on January 28, 2025, is squarely a platform claim. Classified under G06F 21/602 with secret-sharing and signature codes (H04L 9/0844, H04L 9/3247), it claims the system that lets multiple parties compute on sensitive data without revealing it to each other.
A bank is, again, a logical assignee. Financial institutions routinely want to learn from combined data — fraud signals across banks, risk exposure across counterparties, anti-money-laundering patterns across institutions — while being legally and competitively forbidden from pooling that data in the clear. Multiparty secure computing is the cryptographic resolution, and a platform is what makes it operationally usable inside a regulated enterprise.
The platform framing implies the unglamorous, necessary parts: orchestration of the parties, input handling, the secret-sharing or homomorphic core, result reconstruction, and the integration glue that lets non-cryptographers actually run a joint computation. A protocol is a paper; a platform is the thing that turns the protocol into a service line of business can call.
Per the desk's discipline: issued grant (B2), not an application; a system/method claim, not a shipped product — though RBC's documented research into multiparty computation and privacy-preserving analytics is the context. The breadth (system and method) is typical of platform claims.
For the IP reader, this and the Wells Fargo post-quantum portfolio tell a consistent story: large banks are not just consuming advanced cryptography, they are patenting the platforms and methods to deploy it. When the assignees on secure-computation and post-quantum grants are financial institutions building infrastructure, the technologies have crossed firmly from the lab into the enterprise.