On Tuesday, July 14, 2026, Law360 reported that Coinbase Global Inc. urged a federal judge in Texas to dismiss patent infringement claims brought against it, arguing that the asserted patents fail basic legal tests for what can be patented under U.S. law.
In a filing, Coinbase said the patents held by VM Innovations I LLC describe long-standing economic concepts dressed up in technical language to appear more inventive than they are. The company argued that simply applying familiar business practices to blockchain technology does not transform an abstract idea into a patentable invention.
“This is the epitome of the ‘draftsman’s art,'” Coinbase wrote, accusing VM of “using verbosity and technical jargon to monopolize ‘basic tools of commercial work’ rather than promoting innovations.”
The dispute centers on seven patents: U.S. Patent Nos. 10,853,772; 12,051,067; 10,394,845; 10,102,265; 11,861,609; 11,915,237; and 11,494,764. Coinbase specifically singled out the ‘067 and ‘772 patents, saying they cover the same “intermediated settlement” concept that the Supreme Court found ineligible for patent protection in its 2014 ruling in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International.
Coinbase contended that merely moving that concept onto a blockchain does not cure its legal deficiencies, noting that courts have held applying conventional commercial tools to newer technology does not make an idea any less abstract.
Coinbase raised similar objections to the ‘845 and ‘265 patents, which it said claim the abstract idea of creating matching transaction records, again simply layered onto blockchain infrastructure.
VM Innovations, based in Austin, filed its lawsuit in May, accusing Coinbase of infringing the seven patents through two of its products: Coinbase Wallet, which lets users store, manage, and trade cryptocurrency, and Base, an Ethereum Layer 2 network the company markets as a low-cost platform for building decentralized applications.
In its complaint, VM said its patented technology solves specific technical problems unique to decentralized blockchain networks, describing the innovations as addressing issues that were not “well-understood, routine, or conventional” at the time they were developed.
Source: Law360
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