CHAPTER 15

Consensys Quorum

“The goal of Proof of Stake is to be the most efficient way to keep a

public blockchain validated, not to maximize the rewards for a

specific use case.” — Vitalik Buterin

Version 1.0 Launched: November 2016

Founder: JPMorgan

Current Version: 21.10.0

Ethereum was the first public Blockchain platform for building

decentralized applications on production. When Ethereum was

launched in 2015, almost in no time it had gathered momentum

leading to millions of transactions in production; yet the market

quickly realised the need of an enterprise version of Ethereum that

would be ideal for organizations with additional needs of privacy,

scalability, governance, deployment etc. Soon, certain organizations

such as JP Morgan’s Quorum (modified from go-ethereum),

PagaSys’s Besu etc., started working on Ethereum clients on their

own to support permissioned deployment. Together in 2017, these

organizations launched “Enterprise Ethereum Alliance” or EEA to

collectively work on features like privacy, identity, and permission

management etc., and also to build, promote, and the support

adoption of technology in the market. In 2019, Besu was admitted to

the Hyperledger family, and in 2020, Consenys acquired J.P.

Morgan’s Quorum to further advance Ethereum’s enterprise

Blockchain adoption.

In this chapter, we will cover the detailed architecture of Quorum and

learn how it is different from its rivals, Hyperledger Fabric and R3

Corda.

15.1 Key Concept