Ernest & Young’s (EY’s) attempts to promote secure and private transactions over public blockchains at cheaper costs has culminated in the release of Nightfall 3.
The company announced the news via a release on July 1, stating that Nightfall 3 combines zero-knowledge proofs with optimistic rollups — zk-Optimistic Rollups — to improve transaction efficiency on Ethereum.
Indeed, zk-Rollups are one of the layer-two scaling solutions being developed to achieve scalability for networks like Ethereum, using a process of batched transfers “rolled” into one transaction.
EY’s first contribution to ZK proofs was in April 2019, previously reported by Cointelegraph at the time. In this new iteration, the EY team said that Nightfall 3 is a collection of tools for privately managing Ethereum transactions.
Nightfall 3 reportedly ZK proofs transactions into Optimistic Rollups, removing the need for all authentication nodes to verify the validity of the transactions.
Nodes that challenge invalid blocks will receive rewards, thus ensuring that only valid transactions are added to the blockchain. According to the EY team, Nightfall 3 constitutes a significant improvement in transaction efficiency and gas fee reduction.
Detailing the improvements in the zk-Rollups solution, global blockchain leader at EY Paul Brody remarked that the protocol offered the best balance of mathematical efficiency and security for private transactions on the Ethereum network.
According to the announcement, Nightfall 3’s zk-Optimistic Rollups solution can deliver almost 90% in gas fee reduction compared with public ERC-20 token transfers.
By publishing Nightfall 3 to the public domain, Brody stated in the announcement that EY was doing its part to hasten enterprise adoption of the technology.
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With Ethereum 2.0 is still in the works, layer-two solutions like ZK proofs and Optimistic Rollups continue to be touted as short-term solutions to increase Ethereum’s network throughput.
ZK proofs are not EY’s only exploratory work on blockchain technology. Indeed, the firm has previously published a blockchain analyzer tool. The auditing giant released a beta version of the smart contract analyzer back in April 2019.