JP Morgan Creates Privacy-Enhancing Tool For Payments on ETH Blockchain

The United States of America’s largest bank, JP Morgan Chase has announced that it will release an open-source extension which will enhance the privacy of payment mechanisms upon Ethereum-based blockchains.

The new tool has allegedly been designed as a new extension to the Zether protocol. Zether is a privacy-focused payment mechanism which is compatible with Ethereum as well as other platforms with smart contracts. It utilises zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology. The payment mechanism was developed by Stanford University researches in conjunction with Visa Research earlier this year.

It has been reported that JPM has plans to release the extension today. The firm also plans to implement the tool on Quorum, the bank’s private blockchain which is built upon the Ethereuem protocol.

Oil Harri, JPM’s head of Quorum and crypto assets strategy stated in an interview:

“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.”

Harris also noted that Zether’s confidential payments architecture utilises an accounts-based approach consistent with ethereum as opposed to the unspent output approach which both Bitcoin (BTC) and privacy-centric altcoins such as zcash (ZEC) employ.

Harris argues that as “an efficient trustless mechanism for trustless and anonymous payments,” the new tool could be notably advantageous in order to protect privacy within enterprise businesses. He also added that it could also serve JPM’s future interest in the development of Quorum to a wider user base.

JPM has also been at work on revamping the privacy architecture of Quorum with Microsoft’s help in an effort to make the platform easier to use by a broader spectrum of businesses.

Lastly, in addition to its Quorum efforts, the banking firm has been the talk of the town within the crypto community in light of its recently revealed blockchain-powered stablecoin which has been named JPMCoin.