JPMorgan to add new feature to Quorum blockchain to boost anonymity

The blockchain team at investment banking giant JPMorgan Chase has developed a new feature for ethereum blockchains, which will allow hiding not only how much money is being sent, but also the identity of the sender, CoinDesk reported.

The team has built an extension to the Zether protocol, a confidential payment mechanism developed by a group of researchers from Stanford University and Visa Research. Built using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), Zether is compatible with ethereum and other smart contract platforms and allows adding an additional layer of anonymity to transactions.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Oli Harris, JPM’s head of Quorum and crypto-assets strategy, explained that basic Zether allows concealing the account balances and the transfer amounts, not the participants’ identities.

With this new privacy feature, “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 added.

While ZKPs are known to have a drawback of potentially slowing down blockchains, Harris said that they did not face such issue with Zether, adding:

“There is not an impact on performance; it’s more just an additional functionality that would build in. Of course, we are still very early days in terms of doing any detailed testing around performance and scalability in production networks.”

The bank plans to open-source the extension and is expected to use it with Quorum, a permissioned enterprise-variant of the Ethereum blockchain.

Earlier this month, JPMorgan partnered with Microsoft to boost the adoption of enterprise. Under the partnership, JPMorgan’s Quorum has become the first distributed ledger platform available through Azure Blockchain Service.

In 2017, the bank launched Interbank Information Network (IIN) with the objective of speeding up the processing of global payments. Powered by Quorum, IIN has grown to more than 220 banking members.

In February 2019, JPMorgan officially announced its digital currency initiative ‘JPM Coin’. The token will be issued on the Quorum blockchain and represent U.S. dollars held in designated accounts at JPMorgan Chase N.A. The objective is to enable “instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional accounts,” the bank had said. The announcement drew a mixed reaction from the industry.