What is Quorum Blockchain
JPMorgan was the initial founder of the open source enterprise blockchain platform ConsenSys Quorum. It is referred to as a lightweight Ethereum fork. In an effort to promote Ethereum’s enterprise blockchain adoption, ConsenSys purchased Quorum from J.P. Morgan. ConsenSys Quorum is the result of the work of multiple separate projects, such as GoQuorum and Hyperledger Besu.
Quorum was created especially to meet the demands of corporate business, covering privacy, performance, and enterprise permissioning (access control). It seeks to be the best option for businesses with these extra requirements, which public blockchains such as the main Ethereum network are unable to fully satisfy.
Quorum Blockchain Architecture and Characteristics
Geth, the open-source Ethereum client, forms the foundation of ConsenSys Quorum’s architecture. It can be designed in a variety of ways, such as Go-based GoQuorum and Java-based Besu. The research and innovation carried out in the upstream public Ethereum project is advantageous to Quorum.
Among the main modifications and characteristics that set Quorum apart from public Ethereum are:
- Enhanced P2P: Only permitted nodes are able to join with modifications made to the peer-to-peer layer.
- Enhanced state: Quorum maintains a distinct Merkle Patricia state trie for the private state in addition to the public state trie.
- Pluggable consensus: In contrast to the Proof of Work (PoW) employed by public Ethereum, Quorum enables a variety of consensus methods appropriate for consortium networks.
- No transaction fees: Gas prices are set to zero because consortium networks do not require transaction fees. For programming purposes, gas is still present.
- Enhanced RPC API: Quorum’s increased enterprise capabilities, like permissioning and consensus methods, can be accessed through extra RPC APIs.
Quorum Blockchain Component
In addition to the altered Geth client, Quorum has an essential part for managing private transactions:
Privacy Manager: Transaction secrecy is the responsibility of this off-chain component. Usually, it is paired with a Quorum node one-to-one. There are two primary parts to the Privacy Manager:
- Transaction Manager: RESTful endpoints can be used to invoke this stateless component. It takes requests for transaction payloads, encrypts and stores them locally, and then distributes them to other Quorum nodes with permission. It controls access to and distributes encrypted payloads. Java-based Tessera (for GoQuorum clients) or Orion (for Besu) are supported by ConsenSys Quorum; Tessera is still undergoing development.
- Enclave: A separate, autonomous component that offers cryptography services for the encryption and decoding of transaction payloads. It keeps track of the identities of every node in the private network and controls all of the private and public encryption keys. It has a one-to-one relationship with its Transaction Manager and is isolated for parallelization and abstraction.
Quorum Blockchain Features
Privacy: Within the same network, Quorum is made to facilitate both private and public transactions. It relies on the off-chain Privacy Manager for confidentiality and on a mechanism known as restricted private transactions for private transactions. The following steps are involved in a private transaction (for example, between parties A and B, excluding party C):
- A transaction is created by Party A, signed, and sent to their Quorum node. A privateFor property containing the public keys of the intended recipients (A and B) is part of the transaction payload.
- The transaction is sent to its Enclave for encryption by the transaction manager on Node A.
- To ensure that only the intended recipients can decrypt the transaction payload, the Enclave encrypts it.
- Node A’s transaction manager receives the hash of the encrypted payload once it has been locally stored.
- This hash is used to replace the original transaction payload, and the transaction’s V value is altered to 37 or 38 to denote that it is private (public transactions have V=27 or 28).
- The P2P protocol is used to spread the transaction which contains the hash across the whole network.
- The transaction is sent in a block to every node. On the basis of the V value, quorum nodes identify it as private.
- By looking for the hash in their database, nodes ask their transaction managers if they are a party to the transaction. The hash is discovered by the managers of Parties A and B, but not by Party C.
- Parties A and B’s transaction managers ask their Enclaves to decode the payload.
- The private transactions are decrypted by the Enclaves.
- Nodes A and B receive the payload after it has been encrypted.
- Nodes A and B update their private state databases and use the EVM to carry out the contract. Node C disregards the transaction after its management signals that it is not a party.
- Quorum uses the same cryptography stack as public Ethereum, which includes Keccak256, AES CTR, and ECDSA. Additional cryptographic methods including Curve25519, Elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH), poly1305, and Xsalsa20 are used by the privacy manager.
Consensus: A pluggable consensus mechanism is supported by Quorum. Quorum enables the selection of algorithms more appropriate for consortium networks, which frequently provide greater performance, as an alternative to merely depending on PoW or PoS. Among the supported algorithms are:
- Raft: A leader-follower protocol that is Crash Fault-tolerant (CFT). It offers comparable fault tolerance and efficiency to PAXOS and is made to be simple to comprehend and resistant to crash faults. Because Raft does not require forks, it offers instant finality. For basic crash-tolerance needs, it is an option.
- IBFT (Istanbul BFT): A BFT algorithm inspired by Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). It works well in situations requiring the handling of Byzantine defects.
- Clique: A Proof of Authority (PoA) system that was taken from Ethereum’s public version. The identification and standing of reputable validators serve as the foundation for PoA.
Performance: Quorum seeks to solve public blockchains’ performance issues. Using predictable and quick consensus techniques is its main concept. A comparative study table shows Quorum at roughly 700 TPS (*), compared to Hyperledger Fabric at 560 TPS () and R3 Corda at 600 TPS (@), despite reviews reporting performance as high as 2,500 TPS.
Access Control (Permissioning): An enterprise-level access control system is offered by Quorum. It is implemented with Solidity smart contracts and controls consortium members’ network membership. Node management, account-level permissioning, and decision-making through voting for permissioning actions are all supported by this method. The Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) standard served as its inspiration.
Creation and Implementation
Developers have the option of using GoQuorum or Hyperledger Besu for their builds. ConsenSys provides extensive development documentation. On cloud platforms like Azure VM, Quorum can be set up for production use. Besu can also be used as a private permissioned DLT because it is compatible with public Ethereum. GoQuorum and Besu are both free source.
There are two ways to set up a Quorum network: manually or fast with the Quorum Wizard. The Quorum Wizard is a command-line utility that makes it easier to create local Quorum networks. It is a npm module that requires NPM and Node.js. It may provide network setups as kubernetes configurations, docker-compose files, or bash scripts. It enables choosing the number of nodes and the consensus process (Raft or Istanbul). Additionally, it facilitates the integration of Tessera for private transactions and comes with Cakeshop, an optional web-based administration and visualisation tool for contract management, block exploration, and node management.
Industry Adoption and Use Cases
Numerous projects across a range of industries and phases (Proof of Concept, pilot, and production) have used Quorum. Notable initiatives include Project Ubin, which is utilised for clearing and settlement by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and JPM Coin, which is used by JP Morgan for instantaneous client settlement. Major corporations like Microsoft, Novartis, Ant Group, and ING Group are among Quorum’s clientele. Finance, supply chain, healthcare, media, and government are among the industries that use it; post-trade processing (Vakt) and luxury goods tracking (LVMH) are two examples.
Additional Quorum Initiatives
Additionally, Quorum has a pluggable design that enables the addition of additional functionality as plugins without changing the core client, and it supports a Remix plugin for creating private smart contracts within the Remix IDE.