JPMorgan enhances its Ethereum-based blockchain with new privacy features

These enable hiding not only how much money is being sent but who is sending it. The US lender has built an extension to the Zether protocol, a confidential payment mechanism that is compatible with Ethereum and other smart contract platforms and designed to add a further layer of anonymity to transactions.

Zether uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), a branch of mathematics which allows one party to prove knowledge of some secret value or information without conveying any detail about that secret.

The financial institution will open-source the extension on May 28, 2019, and is likely to use it with Quorum, the bank’s homegrown, private version of Ethereum, according to CoinDesk.

So far JPMorgan attracted some 220 banks to its Quorum-based Interbank Information Network and most recently completed a load of integration work with Microsoft Azure as it continues to prepare Quorum to be spun out and exist in the wild as an open-source protocol.