JPMorgan Chase has revealed to CoinDesk that its blockchain team has created a privacy feature for ethereum-based blockchains.
The feature, which is an extension to the Zether protocol, not only hides how much money is being sent, but also who is sending it. It works with ethereum and other smart contract platforms. JPMorgan was set to open-source the extension on Tuesday (May 28), and will probably use it with Quorum, the firm’s own version of ethereum.
“In the basic Zether, the account balances and the transfer accounts are concealed but the participants’ identities are not. 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 transaction’s recipients in a larger group of parties,” Oli Harris, JPM’s head of Quorum and crypto-assets strategy, told CoinDesk.
“When we think about the community building on top of Quorum,” added Harris, “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.”
And one of the oldest and largest banks in South Korea is utilizing blockchain technology to speed up the loan approval process.
According to CoinDesk, Shinhan will reportedly use the blockchain platform to verify some of the paperwork needed to get approved for a loan, such as qualification or certification documents. In the past, these documents needed to be manually verified. Now, the blockchain tech will speed up the process at a lower cost.
The bank has already implemented the technology to its “Shinhan Doctors” loan product, reducing the approval process time from two to three days to “real time.”
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