In today’s digital economy, privacy and security are becoming increasingly critical in facilitating business dealings and transactions. Recognizing this growing importance, EY, a global professional services organization, has taken a step forward in revolutionizing the world of blockchain privacy with the release of the beta version of its zero-knowledge-proof (ZKP) compiler Starlight.
EY has contributed the functional beta version of its zero-knowledge-proof (ZKP) compiler Starlight to the public domain. This contribution is aimed at enabling secure and private business logic on the public Ethereum ecosystem. The goal of this initiative is to simplify and standardize B2B integration for enterprises.
Why it matters? Starlight supports complex business agreements where business logic must be shared between parties at the network level, while also maintaining privacy from competitors. This compiler allows developers to migrate complex B2B business agreements from private portals and point-to-point systems to the public Ethereum network, while retaining the privacy and security that enterprises require.
Paul Brody, EY Global Blockchain Leader, highlights the importance of Starlight’s beta release in the industrialization of blockchain privacy technology.
Dr. Duncan Westland, EY Global Head of Blockchain Research and Development, emphasizes the benefits of Starlight in reducing the learning curve and speeding up the development process for zkApps.
EY’s Contributions to ZKP Technology: EY has made significant contributions to the advancement of ZKP technology in the past. In 2019, EY contributed the blockchain privacy-based protocol Nightfall and updated its public domain source code earlier this year to help enable the development of privacy-focused enterprise blockchain solutions.
Bridging the Knowledge and Development Gap: Starlight is designed to bridge the knowledge and development gap for zkApps (decentralized applications using ZKP technology) by making it easier for developers to bring and use privacy features in their construction.
Using Starlight, developers can easily mark-up standard solidity contracts with elements and logic that need to be made private, and compile them into zero-knowledge applications that can be deployed on-chain.
Combining Starlight and Nightfall: The combination of Starlight and Nightfall is aimed at making it possible for enterprises to handle both large-scale asset, inventory, and payment management and multi-party business logic on the public Ethereum network.
The goal is for any multi-party business agreement with shared data and business rules to be manageable on the public Ethereum blockchain without the need for a centralized intermediary.
The contributions made by EY towards the advancement of ZKP technology demonstrate its commitment to the development and growth of the blockchain industry.
The source code for Starlight and supporting tools are in the public domain and are available on GitHub at https://github.com/EYBlockchain/starlight.
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