Bolt Labs announced a partnership with Tezos that will see their payment channel hosted on the Blockchain. They will work with Nomadic labs and Metastate, developers of the Tezos Blockchain, to make a 2021 integration possible.

The alliance with zkChannels, the brainchild of the Bolt labs launched earlier this year, will enable private Blockchain-based payments leveraging zero-knowledge proof (ZKPs) protocols with a sharp focus on Bitcoin and Zcash. Unlike popular remittance solutions integrated with the Bitcoin Blockchain, Lightning Network discloses that some private features such as people's bank accounts may be exposed, zkChannels seeks to hide this information from the merchants.

“Customers can transact anonymously with Bitcoin without revealing their identity to a merchant.”

The announcement from Bolt labs highlights that both the client and the merchant will have access to data from the zkChannels only viewing different fields. The customer will be notified of the cash distribution, whereas the merchant will be able to tell the amount of cash transacting on the channel without necessarily revealing the identity of the client. However, the protocol leaves allowance for channel closure at any given time to be initiated by either party, individually, or with consent from both parties.

Notably, Bolt labs were launched in 2018 by J. Ayo Akinyele alongside two Zcash cofounders Ian Miers and Matthew Green. They received $1.5 million last year in April in seed round funding that was participated by Xpring, Lemniscap, and angel investor Zooko Wilcox also a cofounder at Zcash.

They settled on Tezos Blockchain due to their flexible governance to facilitate test runs of the channel before it is taken up by other Blockchains. Tezos Blockchain is also best suited to gel with their BLS12-381 protocol with Ethereum currently not extending support for the pairing curve, pending the long-awaited Ethereum 2.0.

Meanwhile, the Tezos XTZ is currently sitting on the 12th spot, with a market capitalization of $1,790,099,395. They have recorded trading volumes of $65,821,412 in the past 24 hours, with 734,831,569 XTZ currently in circulation at the time of this writing.

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