EY's Nightfall_4 Boosts Privacy, Speeds Transactions 20%

EY, a prominent global accounting and consulting firm, has updated its enterprise blockchain solution, Nightfall, to a zero-knowledge rollup design. This update comes at a time when corporate clients are expressing renewed confidence in privacy tools, following the easing of US sanctions on the crypto mixing service Tornado Cash. The new version, Nightfall_4, simplifies the network's architecture and offers near-instant transaction finality on Ethereum, making it more user-friendly compared to its previous optimistic rollup-based version.

The transition to a zero-knowledge rollup model means that transactions become final as soon as they are added to a Nightfall block. This eliminates the need for users to challenge potentially incorrect transactions and wait out the challenging period, leading to faster transaction finality and simpler operations. Unlike optimistic rollups, zero-knowledge rollups do not require a challenger node to secure the network, streamlining the process.

EY's global blockchain leader, Paul Brody, noted that the removal of OFAC sanctions on Tornado Cash has significantly alleviated concerns among legitimate business users about the risks associated with using privacy technologies. Despite EY's earlier efforts to make Nightfall unattractive to bad actors by ensuring it cannot be used anonymously, the lifting of sanctions has further boosted confidence in the use of privacy tools.

Nightfall, launched in 2019, enables EY's business partners to transfer tokens privately using Ethereum's security while being more cost-effective than the base network. The technology binds a verified identity to a public key through digital signatures to mitigate counterparty risk. Nightfall's code is open source on GitHub but remains a permissioned blockchain for EY's customer base, competing with other enterprise-focused blockchain solutions.

Brody mentioned that EY's blockchain team is working towards creating a single environment that supports payments, logic, and composability. Currently, the firm uses Nightfall in conjunction with Starlight, a tool that enables zero-knowledge proofs for complex multiparty business agreements under privacy. EY plans to initially focus on supporting Nightfall_4 deployments before moving on to the development of Nightfall_5. This update marks the fourth major revision to Nightfall since its inception, reflecting EY's commitment to enhancing its enterprise blockchain offerings.