EY Open-Sources 'Nightfall' Code for Private Transactions on Ethereum

One of the world's largest consultancy firms has released a new set of protocols for enabling private transactions atop the ethereum blockchain.

"Nightfall integrates a set of smart contracts and microservices, and the ZoKrates zk-snark toolkit, to enable standard ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens to be transacted on the Ethereum blockchain with complete privacy. It is an experimental solution and still being actively developed."

As previously reported by CoinDesk, the freely-available code is aimed at helping corporate EY clients use the ethereum blockchain for use cases that include supply chain management, food tracing, and transacting between different corporate branches.

As explained by Jonathan Rouach - CEO of privacy-focused blockchain application QEDIT - it's similar to showing someone Waldo exists on a picture without revealing where on that picture he is located.

EY, in specific, aims to run Nightfall in two of their existing blockchain products called "EY OpsChain" and "EY Blockchain Analyzer," according to the firm's global innovation leader for blockchain, Paul Brody.

The EY OpsChain is meant for coding applications on the blockchain for use cases such as procurement, sales, inventory management, and the like.

"We have a second application called the Blockchain Analyzer and that's really to help understand what we did on a blockchain," explained Brody to CoinDesk.

"It's primarily used by our audit teams to match transactions between public or private blockchain networks and ERP systems and other enterprise systems for audit purposes."

Now, with the Nightfall code publicly released on GitHub, Brody notes that other developers outside of EY and their clientele can further iterate and build systems leveraging the new protocol.

"We're trying to put together an entire suite of capabilities that would include audit and security [and] would allow an enterprise to say yes we are comfortable that we can do secure, private, reliable and regulatory compliant business transactions on a public blockchain network."