"Big Four" accounting firm EY has announced a tool that it says will bring private transactions to ethereum – that's the public blockchain, not a permissioned, enterprise version of the network.
The firm announced in a press release Tuesday that its EY Ops Chain Public Edition prototype ("with patents pending") is the "world's first" implementation of zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology for ethereum.
ZKPs are a cryptographic method that allows two parties to prove that a secret is true without revealing the actual secret. In the case of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, this is most often data about transactions.