The financial services giant Mastercard has patented a system for making anonymous transactions in the blockchain network, writes CCN.
As stated in the description of the solution on the website of the Bureau of patents and trademarks USA (USPTO), the transparent nature of the usual blockchain transactions is an obstacle for implementing this technology in daily payments. This applies to both businesses and individual consumers.
For example, someone may make a gift to an important person, notifying her about the details of the transaction. In addition, most companies are not too concerned that competitors or other third parties received real-time data such as, for example, the volume of transactions.
To address this issue, Mastercard has developed a solution to provide to the parties involved in the transaction, the details of which will be available publicly to maintain credibility to the data. This will include the inability to track individual transactions and a transaction, which could identify the participants.
Note that the anonymity of transactions focuses a number of cryptocurrencies, for example, Popego and zcash for. Also promises to increase the privacy of bitcoin network Lightning Network.
Mastercard strives to achieve the same without running cryptocurrency and a new patent of the company, although directly it is not spoken, had the potential to give law enforcement the ability to track illegal transactions.
While cryptocurrencies use p2p transactions offered by Mastercard the system still relies on third-party server that maintains a database of user profiles. Together with the identification data each profile contains a string of secret data.
After receiving information about the transaction from the company server hashes the transaction details, and then combines them with a secret value from the profile. After that, the hash may be published in the blockchain for proof of the integrity of the transaction, without disclosing their specific details.
As previously reported, Mastercard is exploring the possibility of using the technology of the distributed registry for verification of payment cards in retail outlets.
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