The Zerocoin Electric Coin Co. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. today announced the initial release of a zero-knowledge security layer for J.P. Morgan’s enterprise blockchain and smart contract platform Quorum.

Quorum is a distributed ledger technology, or blockchain, developed by J.P. Morgan that’s based on the Ethereum blockchain to facilitate transactions for the financial technology industry. This is the same blockchain platform that will power today’s launch of the Interbank Information Network, a blockchain-based platform for cross-border bank transactions.

Zerocoin’s so-called zero-knowledge security layer, called Zcash, adds a layer of security that anonymizes transactions on a blockchain by hiding the actors and actions involved. With a ZSL protocol involved, a blockchain can be publicly available for auditors to examine and verify that transactions occurred as participants claim they did. At the same time, outside observers cannot discern the sender, receiver or amount of any currency transaction.

“This latest development ensures confidentiality while supporting regulatory disclosure, both of which are key requirements for financial industry applications,” said Zerocoin Chief Executive Zooko Wilcox.

Blockchains have become a trend for building out key information infrastructure for numerous industries where multiple participants must share information in a way that must be both protected and auditable.

For example, IBM Corp. has put a blockchain platform to use for food safety by combining farms, warehouses, shipping companies and retailers into one network. Within that network, all transactions are auditable and visible to the parties engaging in the transactions — and ultimately auditable by food safety regulators all the way down a supply chain. At the same time, competing retailers can be certain that their transactions with other entities in the network cannot be accessed by competitors.

“The implementation of ZSL for Quorum represents an important application of zero-knowledge proofs to the challenge of building a distributed trust infrastructure for enterprises,” said Marley Gray, principal program manager for blockchain at Microsoft Corp.

J.P. Morgan and Zerocoin announced a partnership earlier this year in May to combine efforts to increase security and privacy for blockchain technology. Microsoft has also lent its own efforts to this research and all three companies are part of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a large group of organizations interested in blockchain development and the Ethereum platform.

Zerocoin has also announced that the ZSL technology is being released as open-source software. As a result, developers and organizations can immediately download the software and its code to begin experimenting and testing with business use cases.

Photo: Dave Meier