Dutch banking giant ING has found a solution for one of R3’s problems with the Corda blockchain, CoinDesk reports.
The notary service on Corda has two options: validating notaries, which dive into transactions to make sure they’re legit, or non-validating notaries, which simply record the transaction.
As you can imagine, this poses a few problems: the validating notaries compromise users’ privacy, while the non-validating notaries could become a security risk when people knowingly write invalid transactions.
To thread this needle, ING has applied zero-knowledge proofs, which can prove something is true without revealing any information about it, to Corda’s validating notary function. This allows transactions to be verified without specific knowledge of their contents.
ING is slated to unveil the improvement at CordaCon, an annual developer conference. Andrei Ilchenko, global head of IT wholesale banking channels, at ING, said that the solution had a bonus of being faster that expected, with “ZKP transactions sent to Corda notaries take less time to verify than regular transactions (of which the entire content is visible).”
Photo: ING Group