Ernst & Young recently released Nightfall. We Enhanced its Versatility

After Ernst & Young announced the release of zero-knowledge proof blockchain transaction technology onto the public domain, 0xcert has followed the open invite for improvement proposals, published in the in-depth article by Paul Brody in late May of 2019.

Current data and asset management at the enterprise level face evident issues and Ernst & Young proposed leverage of a public blockchain combined with private transactions as the optimal way to keep transactional information confidential and to mitigate the risk of a central point of attack. Said solution was recently released as Nightfall software that combines the decentralized nature of the Ethereum blockchain with the privacy of cryptographic, zero-knowledge proof to enable enterprises bring their transactions to a high privacy level.

Nightfall supports private yet decentralized transfer and management of cryptocurrency, as well as of unique business assets, such as traded goods, items, and documents, in the form of non-fungible tokens. The immutable nature of non-fungible tokens enables accurate tracking of goods in supply management and trade, protects the data and guarantees payments — features that come handy in the world of enterprises on a daily basis.

As CEO of 0xcert, I was honored to see that Nightfall has written and developed their non-fungible token based on the official reference implementation of the ERC-721 standard, which was published by the 0xcert team in 2018. In order to enhance its features, however, we have forked Nightfall’s open-source code and introduced enhanced non-fungible tokens.

Unique digital assets change the way enterprises operate

The market value of enterprises is defined primarily by financial metrics and capital, but also by their inventory, documents of purchase and sales, and personnel management data. These require particularly attentive management and instill quite some amount of friction. Businesses are form part of cooperation ecosystems, where they exchange data, execute purchases and sales, and interact with other organizations and members of business societies.

Despite implementing industry standards and minimum requirements, enterprises still face friction in operating a business which impedes their growth and optimization. Nightfall did a great job providing decentralized management of private transactions, through implementing smart contracts and data tokenization.

In terms of financial assets, cryptocurrencies or monetary tokens on the Ethereum blockchain are formalized as fungible or interchangeable tokens. On the other hand, the assets that represent non-monetary values, such as physical assets or digital data, come in the form of non-fungible or unique tokens. Within the scope of an enterprise, these can represent inventory number, titles and/or signatories of documents, order details, etc. By implementing non-fungible tokens, enterprises can manage and run their inventory and operations in a wholly digital way. Smart contracts integrated within Nightfall allow for data tracking and diminish operational friction.

Standardized, but with further potential

With Nightfall, Ernst & Young have proven to understand the potential of the blockchain tech within the business space. I’m excited to see their commitment to instilling adoption of the blockchain tech, especially so by releasing their work onto the public domain, which will surely bring extraordinary benefits to enterprises both small all large.

On behalf of the community working with non-fungibility, I find it particularly encouraging to see EY recognize the applicability of unique, non-fungible digital tokens.

Having said that, it is important to stress that — aligned with the never-ending evolution of tech — improvements can always be made. The ERC-721 standard for non-fungible tokens has been confirmed by the community and indeed represents a crucial set of tokenization guidelines — however, the latest official implementation of the standard does not include all the features that make non-fungible tokens as potent as they are. With that in mind, the 0xcert team was eager to respond to the public call for improvements of the Nightfall software and spend the last week working on boosting the advantages that the blockchain tech will bring to businesses through EY.

To enhance the Nightfall software with added interoperability and certification features, the 0xcert dev team has forked the open-source code of Nightfall and changed the standard ERC-721 token implementation with the enhanced ERC-721 token. All the features and potential of the original token has been kept intact, we’ve just added two more token features to it — namely interoperability and certification. This way, Nightfall will be able to provide stronger and more versatile practices of data and asset exchange on the inter-business (or even inter-department) level.

Certification and interoperability in Nightfall

The enhanced ERC-721 token is called Xcert, and compared to the ERC-721 reference implementation, it broadens the use of non-fungible tokens and data privacy. Its certification feature creates a cryptographic imprint based on the asset’s metadata. With such an imprint, you can easily verify that a data record in question exists and is authentic, without the need to reveal any sensitive data contained in the record.

Imprints thus expose only the data needed for verification, such as the date and status of a transaction. The rest of the content, on the other hand, particularly confidential information like trading parties, order value or discounts, price per item, etc. can be kept entirely private.

With the certification feature, the Xcert token also becomes interoperable among all users of Nightfall, even though they might follow a different industry standard in their operations. This makes the Nightfall software easier to implement in multi-party processes, which further boosts the adoption of private transactions on the blockchain among businesses.

With these new characteristics, Xcerts are contextified ERC-721 non-fungible tokens. By implementing them, you can find the exact information of the kind of asset the Xcert represents and verify its existence.

The fork of the Nightfall’s open-source code by 0xcert has been published in a public 0xcert repository. With new features of interoperability and certification broadening the scope of Nightfall, we hope the businesses will embrace the value of exchanging their assets among managing parties without risking non-compliance with third-party standards nor a lack of reliable asset certification proof.