JPMorgan Adds New Privacy Features to Its Ethereum-Based Quorum Blockchain

JPMorgan Chase's blockchain team has developed a privacy feature for ethereum-based blockchains, obscuring not only how much money is being sent but who is sending it.

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, JPMorgan has built an extension to the Zether protocol, a fully decentralized.

S, compatible with ethereum and other smart contract platforms and designed to add a further layer of anonymity to transactions.

The New York-based financial institution will open-source the extension Tuesday, and is likely to use it with Quorum, the bank's homegrown, private version of ethereum.

JPMorgan has had a busy year in the blockchain space, and not just with its headline-grabbing plan for an internal, price-stable cryptocurrency called JPM Coin.

With Microsoft Azure as JPM continues to prepare Quorum to be spun out and exist in the wild as an open-source protocol.

The UTXO is also a feature of the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency zcash, which the original ZKP component of Quorum was based on.

In this way, the extension could benefit not only users of Quorum, but also enterprises building on top of other ethereum variants - or, conceivably, businesses leveraging the public ethereum chain.

Harris, whose job is to strengthen Quorum efforts inside the bank and beyond, added: "When we look at our own JPMorgan applications will be one choice of many that we will be looking at."

The work to make transactions more confidential on Zether could also be used to fine-tune Quorum for deployment inside enterprise consortia, making the extension another step towards hardening the protocol for a long-contemplated spin-out from the bank.