A senior executive for the Big Four auditor Ernst & Young (EY), thinks that blockchain will change everything for the financial space, but only if the industry can solve its privacy problems.

The EY global innovation lead Paul Brody has said:



“Blockchain is going to be the tool that ties together not just individual companies, but whole business ecosystems and networks. Enterprises will not go on to the public mainnet without privacy and security.”



Earlier this week, CoinDesk was able to sit down with Brody in order to talks about all things related to crypto including privacy solutions. Specifically, Nightfall, which is the EY open-source code repository. The interviewer, Christine Kim sat down with Brody at DevCom 5 in Japan recently where some interesting answeres were procured from the senior exec.

For starters, Brody states that the protocol implements a zero-knowledge proof with smart contracts, enabling private transactions on the public ethereum blockchain.

Procurements are a specific use case. Any enterprise that is able to leverage different pricing models often leaves money on the table when making purchase orders. Nightfall, however, can set up smart contracts “without any additional administrative or operational overhead” that set off the best price as Brody argues.

Now, the basic product is currently free on GitHub but despite this, Nightfall’s transaction costs are still relatively high at about ten US dollars. The senior exec at EY believes that such costs could drop below a dollar over the next 2 months. If this was to become reality, it would mean that Nightfall could eventually be more cost-effective than private, permissioned blockchains.

It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!