JP Morgan Testing AZTEC

| Publish date: 03/01/2019
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One of the world’s biggest banks, JP Morgan Chase & Co.’s Blockchain team is testing AZTEC, another zero-knowledge proof solution (ZKP).

ZKPs are a branch of math that allow proving the truth of a statement related to a data set without that data being revealed. It is seen as the answer to privacy concerns which have made regulated institutions wary of using shared distributed ledgers.

An Unusual Partnership

JP Morgan’s Blockchain arm, Quorum has already been quietly doing cutting edge work in this space, and is now testing a second ZKP solution with the London-based company that carries the same name, AZTEC.

The protocol AZTEC a ZKP that targets allowing the encryption of data on a Blockchain at lower costs and with greater efficiency than older version of this technology.

Tom Pocock, the Chief Executive Officer of AZTEC stated that they were working with JP Morgan Quorum on this, which was also confirmed by a source at the bank. According to the insider, Quorum was working with AZTEC to see if ZKPs could be industrialized for their company.

This partnership is rather unusual, since the bank has so far been very particular about limiting its Blockchain work to gated systems (private Blockchains). Even the newly launched JPM Coin, which is the dollar-backed crypto being launched by the bank, will only run on Quorum, the bank’s private Ethereum-based Blockchain. And, it will only be available to screened institutional clients.

AZTEC’s goal, on the other hand, is to create a bridge between the public and private Blockchain spaces.

The Bridge Between the Public and the Private

According to Pocock, AZTEC is looking at getting the best from both worlds. He states that their protocol lets a person take assets that would usually be restricted to a private Blockchain and use it on a public Blockchain. These private assets can be traded and cleared with all the added executional safeguards that a private Blockchain would have.

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The CTO of AZTEC, Dr. Zac Williamson states that their protocol has used a different path to privacy compared to Quorum. Quorum has combined its in-house Constellation privacy network with ZKPs. Williamson says that this is a type of permissioning that allows for privacy to be maintained.

However, with AZTEC, since it is public, there is no overseer that has privileged access to information and data. Therefore, the protocol uses a special kind of ZKP that is called Range Proof that is combined with other forms of cryptographic commitments.

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