ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 21 -- United States Patent no. 12,769,753, issued on Oct. 20, was assigned to Alipay (Hangzhou) Information Technology Co. Ltd. (Hangzhou, China).

"Data query method and apparatus, and secure multi-party database" was invented by Qunshan Huang (Hangzhou, China), Shunde Cao (Hangzhou, China), Yang Yang (Hangzhou, China), Jun Qi (Hangzhou, China), Lei Wang (Hangzhou, China), Benyu Zhang (Palo Alto, Calif.), Pu Duan (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Jian Du (Hangzhou, China), Qingkai Mao (Hangzhou, China), Yang Zhao (Hangzhou, China) and Kefeng Yu (Hangzhou, China).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "This specification provides a multi-party database including a central node and a plurality o...