Crypto media portal Coindesk revealed the introduction on May 28. To put it more simply, the blockchain team of JPMorgan Chase has created a privacy function for ethereum-based blockchains that not only obscures how much cash is sent, but also who sends it.
Reportedly, the unique tool was intended as Zether protocol’s extension. As stated, Zether is interoperable with Ethereum and several other smart contract platforms as a privacy-focused money transfer system.
The protocol utilizes zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) protocol built by Stanford University and Visa Research scientists earlier this year.
Zether, constructed by a team of scholars and scientists in financial technology including Stanford University’s Dan Boneh, utilizes zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), a mathematics division that enables one party to demonstrate knowledge of some hidden importance or data without communicating any details about that secret.
JPM is allegedly planning to publish its extension as an open source today, implementing the module on Quorum, the bank’s personal blockchain platform developed on the Ethereum protocol. Oli Harris, director of Quorum and crypto-asset policy at JPM, described the role of the unique extension in an interview with Coindesk, stating that:
“In the basic Zether, the account balances and the transfer amounts are concealed but the participants’ identities are not necessarily concealed. So we have solved that. In our implementation, we provide a proof protocol for the anonymous extension in which the sender may hide herself and the transactions recipients in a larger group of parties.”
To further differentiate Zether, Harris observed that its private payment design utilizes an ethereum-consistent account-based method, as opposed to the unspent transaction output method used by both Bitcoin (BTC) and altcoins focused on privacy such as zcash (ZEC). Harris suggested that as an “an efficient trustless mechanism for trustless and anonymous payments,” the unique extension could be of particular benefit to privacy protection within corporate associations, and that it could also fulfill the purposes of JPM to create Quorum for broader use in the future.
In the blockchain domain JPMorgan has had a productive year, not just with ideas that hogged limelight such as the creation of stable cryptocurrency called JPM Coin.
Significantly, the company has drawn about 220 banks to its Quorum-based Interbank Information Network and lately finished a series of integration tasks with Microsoft Azure as JPM intends to design Quorum as an open-source protocol.
The UTXO is also a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency zcash function that was based on Quorum’s initial ZKP element. In this manner, the update could profit not only Quorum consumers, but also companies that build on top of other ethereum versions–or, possibly, companies that leverage the government ethereum chain.
Keeping all aspects of operations secret between banks and others could be a blessing for initiatives such as ethereum-based Komgo, which includes trading in powerdomain.
Regarding community building over Quorum, Harris said “if anyone is looking to get an efficient trustless mechanism for trustless and anonymous payments in a consortium then that’s when it’s relevant. That’s why we wanted to open-source it back to the community so anyone can build on it further and continue enhancing it and potentially put it into their use cases as needed.”
Harris, whose task is to reinforce Quorum’s attempts inside and outside the bank, added: “When we look at our own JPMorgan applications [the extended version of Zether] will be one choice of many that we will be looking at.” The work on creating transfers more secure on Zether can also be used to perfect Quorum for implementation inside the company consortia, thus making the update yet another move in the right direction.
The volume of computing they perform, possibly decelerating blockchains, is one disadvantage of complex zero-knowledge demonstrating systems. But Harris said that the additional layer of cryptography to obfuse member identity with Zether did not seem to have that impact, stating:
“The performance is quite good; we had done multiple iterations to improve it and we are doing the verification in solidity smart contracts. We’ll be including in our report the performance measurements for proving and verification.”
As lately stated, JPM also worked with Microsoft to reshape Quorum’s privacy architecture in an effort to make it simpler for a wider range of companies to adopt the platform.