On legitimizing zk-SNARK tech via enterprise partnerships

Hello!

By now, you might be aware of the recently announced partnership with J.P. Morgan to implement zk-SNARKs in their enterprise blockchain system, Quorum. Press release: Zero-knowledge Security Layer to be Added to Quorum Blockchain Platform - Electric Coin Company

This is a really big opportunity for legitimizing the technology behind Zcash and in no sense should this be taken as J.P. Morgan endorsing the open cryptocurrency. Why would one of the biggest banks in the world endorse a permissionless cryptocurrency anyways? It wouldn’t make much sense for them to do. What they’re really after is the expertise of the Zcash team to best help them build an enhanced settlement layer in Quorum.

Privacy is clearly a really important component for enterprises and this partnership highlights that exactly. While Quorum had already been focused on presenting a privacy-focused enterprise blockchain, they were limited in a few areas that integrating zk-SNARKs can solve.

Finally, we have not sold our souls to the devil as much as this partnership might make it seem. :slight_smile: Quorum is an open source project, incubated by technologists at J.P. Morgan, but open for anyone to use, extend, etc. This is a big part for why the Zcash company is excited about helping Quorum improve privacy for settlements of contracts in the system.

TL;DR: J.P. Morgan opting to hire the Zcash team to build zk-SNARKs into Quorum is a great endorsement for the tech and the team making Zcash what it is!!

6 Likes

The question to ask then, is how much of the team’s time will be taken away from projects and general round table idea sessions of Zcash while working for J.P. Morgan. Speaking from experience, when you work more than one job, something else in life loses. It could be friends, sleep, sanity, or the original job…

Another question to ask, are you concerned that any new idea’s you come up with (to solve a problem(s) on the implementation) while working on the J.P. Morgan project may becomes proprietary to them; therefore can not be brought back to Zcash without licensing it?

3 Likes

Just look for the Zerocoin Electric Coin company to be a much larger company than it is today.
There is a lot of room for their zero knowledge tech and the Zcash coin will greatly benefit from it.

1 Like

Great question. We have allocated the times of 2 engineers for this temporary work and intend to get them back on Zcash as soon as possible. Additionally, as we expand the team, for any enterprise projects we may take on, this allocation of time will be much smoother.

Well, it seems for JPM, building Quorum is a way to use their vast resources for research and credibility. They repeatedly mentioned not “owning” Quorum and many different groups have already taken the infrastructure to build + maintain their own systems. And FWIW, Quorum is licensed under LGPL: GitHub - ConsenSys/quorum: A permissioned implementation of Ethereum supporting data privacy

2 Likes

Thanks for the explanation, I was a bit confused for a bit on what was going on for a moment.

Crossposting a post that by accident is more related to this topic:

Just out of curiousity, how does Zcash profit from this other than some minor image improvement?
As it’s open source i guess not even a license fee was paid, or?

… but aren’t we creating competition that way and fail to monetize ZEC dev teams hard work which is paid by miners?