A bank from Australia will be among the first financial institutions to experiment with the new features of Chainlink’s CCIP Private Transactions.
It was announced today by Chainlink itself with an official press release.
The bank of Australia chooses Chainlink to ensure privacy
It will be about Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), a multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Melbourne, and the second largest bank in Australia by assets (fourth by market capitalization).
It is a banking group born from the merger of several banks, including ANZ Bank, founded in 1951.
The group has more than 40,000 employees and a turnover exceeding 20 billion dollars.
It is listed on the stock exchange with the ticker ANZ, both on the Sydney Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, and has a market capitalization of more than 93 billion dollars.
In 2022, it also launched a digital bank, ANZ Plu, and funded a blockchain startup.
Previously, in 2015, it had already joined the Hyperledger project.
ANZ is therefore a traditional financial institution with several decades of operations behind it, but in recent years it has decided to also enter the crypto world.
The CCIP Private Transactions of Chainlink chosen by the bank of Australia
The new CCIP Private Transactions feature was created by Chainlink to address the longstanding challenges of compliance and privacy related to blockchain interoperability, with the specific goal of paving the way for broader institutional adoption of the blockchain.
This is, as the name suggests, a privacy protection feature based on the new Chainlink Blockchain Privacy Manager, which allows financial institutions to maintain data confidentiality, data integrity, and regulatory compliance during transactions on blockchain networks.
ANZ will experiment with it for the cross-chain settlement of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) as part of the Project Guardian initiative by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
Privacy in cross-chain transactions has never been particularly protected, thus preventing financial institutions from interacting significantly across various blockchain environments in a way that meets regulatory requirements such as GDPR and MiFID II. In fact, these institutional requirements include the need for complete end-to-end privacy.
According to Chainlink, its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) is now the industry standard for connecting both public and private blockchain ecosystems.
Chainlink Blockchain Privacy Manager
The Blockchain Privacy Manager by Chainlink allows institutions to connect private chains to other public and private blockchains by leveraging the public Chainlink CCIP network. This connectivity is achieved by revealing only the onchain information selected by the institution as necessary to process each transaction.
CCIP Private Transactions leverages Blockchain Privacy Manager to enable a new onchain encryption and decryption protocol, allowing institutional cross-chain transactions on multiple private chains while keeping transaction details private, including data, token amounts, and counterparties.
ANZ and Chainlink have already demonstrated the cross-chain settlement of tokenized assets, highlighting how financial institutions can leverage Chainlink CCIP to offer their clients the ability to trade and settle tokenized assets on public blockchains.
The comments
The Banking Services Lead of ANZ, Nigel Dobson, stated:
“The new cross-chain privacy features of Chainlink have the potential to further accelerate institutional adoption of blockchain by enabling end-to-end privacy between blockchain networks. Through our ongoing collaboration with Chainlink Labs, we look forward to testing CCIP and demonstrating how this long-standing privacy issue can be addressed”.
The co-founder of Chainlink, Sergey Nazarov, added:
“Privacy is a fundamental requirement for most institutional transactions. So far, the blockchain sector has not provided the necessary level of privacy to successfully proceed with these institutional transactions, limiting the growth of the entire sector. Now that private cross-chain transactions are possible, we expect an even greater influx of institutional adoption of blockchain, CCIP, and the Chainlink standard in general. We are excited to continue our collaboration with ANZ and explore how to conduct 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 sector through their exciting participation”.
