Mastercard and ConsenSys team up to make ETH faster and more private

Mastercard has teamed up with software company ConsenSys to launch a solution aimed at making the ETH network more scalable, faster and more private.

This is ConsenSys Rollups, which will provide “privacy and scalability features” for applications connected to any system that supports the ETH Virtual Machine (EVM).

In practice, the solution, which will run on a private test chain, offers the ability to increase throughput by up to 10,000 transactions per second. Thus, it contributes to the “mission” of ETH 2.0. It is worth noting that, currently, the main network processes only 15 transactions per second.

According to a statement from ConsenSys, published on Thursday (16), to design the solution, the company took advantage of the expertise of Mastercard’s engineering team.

DeFi, NFT, games and metaverse will benefit

As ConsenSys has pointed out, projects on ETH are exploding in areas such as DeFi, NFT, gaming, Web 3.0 and metaverse.

According to the company, this shows the strong adoption of the platform. But it also requires network enhancements:

“ETH usage is the highest ever. There are over 177 million existing ETH addresses and tens of thousands added every day. However, while high network usage indicates strong adoption, it also points to the need for scalability and privacy-enhancing solutions,” the statement said.

ConsenSys explained that the software solution can be used on ETH Mainnet or on private ConsenSys Quorum networks.

The developers explained that the tool leverages zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs to protect specific elements of the transaction. That is, account balances, sender, recipient and value.

The goal is to prevent this important transaction data from being shared publicly across the network. In this way, the feature significantly increases the privacy and confidentiality of transactions.

“Zero knowledge proof technologies allow one party to demonstrate their knowledge to another without having to share the actual information. In this context, they are used to verify and certify transactions without having to execute them on the blockchain network”, they explained.

Madeline Murray, global leader in Protocol Engineering at ConsenSys, highlighted that the solution allows for much more scalability and privacy protections. In addition, it can be used to enhance solutions to existing use cases and enable new use cases.

“This innovative solution will help accelerate the construction of the future of finance,” he added.

New Use Cases

New use cases cited by Murray include: Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs); decentralized exchanges (DEXs); micropayments; private transfer and taxes.

About the initiative, Raj Dhamodharan, Executive Vice President of Digital Assets and Products and Blockchain Partnerships at Mastercard, highlighted:

“We believe there is real potential in the blockchain helping to solve real world problems. Consumer protection, including privacy and highly scalable infrastructure, are essential requirements for any blockchain solution we build. Our collaboration with ConsenSys is a key step in meeting this need and advancing this space.”