Today at Sibos, Chainlink launched new privacy capabilities for its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), the industry standard for cross-chain digital asset and data transfer. These features, powered by the Chainlink Blockchain Privacy Manager, complement Chainlink’s existing privacy-preserving capabilities, including DECO – a novel ZK-oracle technology for authenticating web data without revealing private information onchain.
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), one of the largest banks in the Asia-Pacific region with over 1.1 trillion AUD in assets, will be the first major institution to pilot CCIP Private Transactions for cross-chain settlement of tokenized real-world assets under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian – a multi-year collaboration between policymakers and the financial industry to enhance financial markets’ liquidity and efficiency through asset tokenization.
CCIP Private Transactions aims to accelerate blockchain and digital asset adoption by allowing institutions to connect their private blockchains to the multi-chain economy while ensuring privacy and regulatory compliance with legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II).
Through a novel onchain encryption and decryption protocol, CCIP Private Transactions allows institutions to interact with multiple private and public chains while defining conditions that permit authorized parties to verify certain data for compliance while keeping that same data private from all unauthorized third parties and adversaries.
CCIP leverages Chainlink’s industry-leading, battle-tested decentralized oracle network, which has enabled over $16 trillion in transaction value across 19+ blockchain networks, to achieve the highest level of cross-chain security and features a separate Risk Management Network that independently monitors for suspicious activity.
ANZ was among a dozen banks and financial market infrastructure providers that collaborated with Swift to develop a blockchain interoperability model for traditional financial institutions to securely transfer tokenized assets between chains using their existing infrastructure and CCIP. ANZ also uses CCIP to power cross-chain, cross-currency tokenized green financial products.
In an official announcement, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov underscored CCIP’s new privacy capabilities as a solution to long-standing compliance and confidentiality challenges that have stymied institutional blockchain adoption.
“Now that private transactions across chains are possible, we expect an even greater influx of institutional adoption of blockchains, CCIP, and the Chainlink standard in general,” he said.
“We are excited to continue our collaboration with ANZ and explore how to make large transactions across multiple chains in a way that helps meet their compliance and legal requirements, enabling their entry into the market and the growth of the entire blockchain industry through their exciting participation.”
“Chainlink’s new cross-chain privacy capabilities have the potential to further accelerate institutional blockchain adoption by enabling end-to-end privacy between blockchain networks,” added Nigel Dobson, Banking Services Lead at ANZ.
“Through our ongoing collaboration with Chainlink Labs, we are looking forward to piloting CCIP and demonstrating how this long-standing privacy problem can be addressed.”
For more information, read Chainlink’s official blog post.