JP Morgan Chase Develops Privacy Extension For Zether Protocol

By hashlytag | hashlytag | 5 Jun 2019

The largest bank in the United States, JP Morgan Chase (JPM), has reportedly developed an extension for Ethereum- based blockchains. Coindesk writes this in an article that was published on 28th of May. The extension is likely to be released with an open source license, but JPM also plans to use the extension itself.

The software has been developed as an extension for the Zether protocol, a payment mechanism that focuses on privacy that can work in combination with Ethereum, among others. The Zether protocol was developed by researchers at Stanford University in collaboration with Visa Research.

In addition to the fact that JPM will make the extension of this privacy protocol open-source, it will also apply the extension to Quorum. This is JPM's private blockchain that is built on top of the Ethereum protocol. In a reaction to Coindesk, the head of Quorum and Crypto-assets Strategy, Oli Harris, explains what the extension looks like:

In the basic version of Zether, the account balances and the transaction amounts are hidden, but the identity of the participants is not necessarily hidden. So we solved that. In our implementation, we provide a proof protocol for the anonymous extension in which the sender can hide himself and the recipients of transactions in a larger group of parties.

The extension extends the JPM private blockchain. Earlier it was announced that JPM had entered into a partnership with Microsoft to further develop the platform so that as many companies as possible could use it in the future.

JPM launched its own cryptocurrency at the start of this year: JPM Coin. The cryptocurrency is a stablecoin and is only used within the bank to make internal payments. The fact that the largest bank in the US is working hard on blockchain solutions and has its own stablecoin is good news for the overall crypto sector as it benefits the adoption of blockchain by traditional companies.