In an attempt to promote users privacy, blockchain developers of ING are currently testing entirely new technology, named as ‘bulletproof’. The testing of the technology is carried out at the global bank in Netherland. The technology is basically designed to hide the amount of bitcoin transactions transferred; usually, the amount is visible to everyone, reports of 15th April 2019 mentions.
Bulletproof technology is developed and improved by hardcore cryptographers at the University of Standford, University College London and Blockstream a startup firm.
Privacy of users is an important factor for the cryptocurrency industry, and many are talking about it. One of the firms that it taking over the challenge is the Netherland based ING Bank –a global bank.
The banks have privacy concerns about the distributed ledger technology (DLT), they have no other option since they don’t wish to reveal competitive and delicate information of the client to others.
To overcome the obstacles, banks have worked on various solutions, and one of them is the Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) solution, a mode of showing secret wealth without exposing the secret itself. Over the years, ING bank has examined ZKP variants like range proofs and zero-knowledge set membership.
A lot of computation is consumed by ZPKs solution which results in blockchain network slow down. Now ING expects bulletproof to be more productive and better to use version of these proofs.
The main objective of designing a bulletproof solution is to ensure that a user can trust that his/her bitcoin transaction is hidden and not available to any third person.
According to ING bank, it noticed that bulletproof solution is 10 times faster than other proofs, for a separate range proof, ING’s blockchain global head, Mariana Gomes de Ia Villa stated.
In this situation, Gomes de la Villa said: “bulletproofs would allow a solution that is 300 times more effective than other alternative range proofs.”
Blockchain mathematician Andrew Poelstra informed source through email: “When we developed bulletproofs in 2017, we did not expect such an uptake. We’re very excited and proud whenever we see the technology being applied to real-world problems if a little surprised its found a use-case in traditional banking.”
User’s privacy is an important concern in the cryptocurrency market, looks like there is no solution for it, but now due to the introduction of a new bulletproofs solution, the hopes are higher again, and this could be a solution for the prolonged problem of ages.
Bitcoin fans also hope that by hiding the transaction amount to the third parties and by making the user’s bitcoin transaction private could assist in reducing the cases related to frauds and scams and may draw attention of many investors towards cryptocurrency space.
Gomez de la Villa said that we are creating entirely ZKP shop in-order to help developers to find these use cases and are in touch with few of their customers to assure that they have a better understanding of how they can utilize these open source projects that ING maintains.
