Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
April 30, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- Perhaps, traditional
banking will embrace the wild west of Blockchain innovation after
all. It recently
came to light that ING, the Netherlands-based
banking giant, has been working on particularly interesting
research in the space since as early as November of last
year.
If you know about ZCash, then you already have
heard about the underlying technology that it and several other
coins are using, called zero-knowledge proofs. For a brief
review, zero-knowledge
proofs are, in crypto, essentially a highly secure
way to send and verify transactions. When this type of, what can be
called, consensus is used in transferring cryptocurrencies, no
private or public keys are used.
While this concept is highly
technical, what it seems to boil down to is that both parties
mainly use the knowledge of the amount the sender had at the
beginning of the transaction as well as the amount the receiver
ends up with at the end of the transaction. The kicker is, it gets
a bit more complicated and this concept bears further
explanation.
In the beginning of the process of
using zero-knowledge proofs to reach consensus, it appears that the
receiver does not even know how much currency the sender meant to
send. Hackernoon provides an example that amounts to the receiver
ending up with four or so choices with only one being unlocked for
the receiver to add information to.
It should be noted that the
receiver can see four transaction amounts in this case. The
unlocked choice represents the intended transaction amount. The
receiver then needs to indicate whether he or she ended up with the
same amount of a different amount from that unlocked amount. If the
amounts are shown to be the same, the process is finished and the
transaction is approved. If they are shown to differ, then by all
accounts, the process begins again.
ING bank is actually doing work in
this relatively narrow area. More precisely, they are reportedly
innovating on Zero Knowledge proofs, in-house. One particular new
application of this technology that ING seems interested in is
using it to verify that someone has the salary range needed to
apply for a mortgage without publicly disclosing what the person’s
exact salary is.
In terms of how they are innovating
on these proofs, it has been mentioned that ING plans to explore
using them to work with data beyond numbers. To do this, ING states
that they will use a variation of zero-knowledge proofs called
“zero-knowledge set-membership,” according to Coin Desk.
Zero-knowledge
set membership can be understood as being the same
as the above explanation of zero-knowledge proofs except that sets
are used instead of individual transaction data. These sets can be
a wide-range of things from salary levels to other demographic
information.
Reportedly, these types of data are
exactly what ING hopes to use the technology for. What is even more
striking than what ING is doing in the crypto space is how they are
doing it. Like Cardano and unlike most
private institutions who are starting blockchain projects, ING’s
projects are open source and being peer-reviewed.
Judging by this, the benefits are
two-fold. First, it’s promising that yet another well-known
financial institution is moving into crypto. Secondly, the fact
that such a company is placing a high level of trust in blockchain
tech could signal . Perhaps the snowball effect into
widespread adoption will have truly begun when and if more
institutions follow ING’s lead.
By: BGN Editorial Staff