Ernst & Young (EY), one of the Big Four accounting firm, intends to unveil its zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) privacy solution to assist in accelerating the use of secure, private blockchain trades. The model of the ZKP private transaction protocol, dubbed as EY Ops Chain Public Edition (PE), was introduced in October 2018 at Ethereum Devcon in Prague.
The prototype incorporated a specimen supply chain dummy created in the public Ethereum blockchain network using the private transaction technology following which developers and ethical hackers were invited to find bugs in the encryption and expose the private info. The model supposedly permitted EY teams to considerably minimize transaction handling costs for prototype users by over 90%, using a mix of better info encoding and improved ZKP protocol.
EY team has also labored to enhance capability of the ZKP based tool, and is planning for the commercial launch of the software solution. The tool will permit enterprises to safely and privately build and offer tokens related to product and service, on the Ethereum blockchain, with private access to the transaction documents. This will assist in exchangable token payments in accordance with the ERC-20 standard and exclusive asset transfers congruent with the ERC-721 standard.
Commenting on the initiative, Paul Brody, EY Global Innovation Leader, Blockchain, said “Making public blockchains secure and scalable is a priority for EY. The fastest way to spread this privacy-enhancing technology was to make it public. The gold standard in security is only achieved with the kind of intense review and testing that comes with public domain releases.”
The development of software is in its review phase and is anticipated to be unveiled for customer use in the next four to six weeks. EY also launched a bouquet of blockchain based solutions and tool upgrades, including EY Smart Contract Analyzer, a tool for validating and safeguarding the smart contract deployed on the Ethereum blockchain, and EY Blockchain Analyzer, a blockchain analytics tool structured to assist EY audit groups in obtaining all transaction details from several ledgers of an organization, and the latest version of EY Ops Chain.
