The article:
JPMorgan Chase has partnered with National Bank of Canada and other major firms to trial a blockchain platform aimed to improve the debt issuance process.
As reported by Reuters, the investment bank said in a statement Friday that the trial, which took place on Wednesday, mirrored a $150 million offering the same day by the the National Bank of Canada of a one-year floating-rate Yankee certificate of deposit.
The trial also saw participation from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Pfizer, Legg Mason Inc's Western Asset and others.
David Furlong, senior vice president of blockchain at National Bank of Canada, said in a statement that blockchain technology "has the potential to bring about major change in the financial services industry."
Based on JPMorgan's Quorum blockchain, the debt-issuance platform took over an year to build, according to the report.
As reported by CoinDesk in March, the bank is currently mulling spinning off the Quorum project as an independent company.
A spokesperson for the bank declined to comment on what they called "speculation" at the time, but said that "Quorum has become an extremely successful enterprise platform even beyond financial services and we're excited about its potential."
However, Umar Farooq, head of blockchain initiatives for JPMorgan's corporate and investment arm, confirmed the move to Reuters in today's report, saying that discussions are in the early stages and the bank has had interest from financial institutions in the project.
The open-source Quorum blockchain was launched in 2016 as a permissioned version of ethereum. In October 2017, it notably integrated the zero-knowledge security layer (ZSL) from privacy-focused public blockchain zcash.
The technology obscures all identifiable information about a transaction but still provides the ability to audit those transactions.
https://www.coindesk.com/jpmorgan-trial-puts-debt-issuance-on-a-blockchain/....
JP Morgan operates the united states food stamp welfare program and profits billions of dollars from it. There is potential for this technology to be utilized in conjunction with welfare programs as we've seen the UN, IMF, World Bank, etcetera attempt to sponsor biometric electronic welfare programs for africans and others. That could be one route they would pursue if this technology were implemented.
This last line is a contradiction and untrue:
The technology obscures all identifiable information about a transaction but still provides the ability to audit those transactions.
I would guess there is some meta data the ledger screens on an application level but it doesn't 100% wipe all relevent data. Even if it did a lot of the relevent data could be logged and recorded in other ways which would allow law enforcement or state surveillance to recompile it if necessary. I think that is more a marketing gimmick than something which reflects reality. The concept of true anonymous transactions is not likely something we will ever see implemented in blockchain.
