What is Quorum Blockchain? Is it right for your business? - YouTube

American financial services and investment giant JP Morgan has developed a blockchain.

What is it and could it be the private blockchain your business has been waiting for?

Hello and welcome back to the Akeo Tech channel where business

and technology go together like a lock and key.

My name is Louie Procopio and today

we'll be taking a closer look at JP Morgan's Enterprise focused blockchain.

It is open source, it's a soft fork of the very well-known public

Ethereum blockchain. It's Quorum.

Here at AKEO we are fascinated by all things Tech and how they are shaping the

future of business and money. Emerging technologies like Big Data, virtual and

augmented reality and machine learning are all topics we will discover more

about here on the channel, but in due time. So far on the channel we have been

focused on a different emerging technology that is distributed ledger

technologies or DLT as it is referred to in the tech industry. Over the last few

episodes we've taken a look at a couple of different enterprise focused blockchain

solutions. Today is the third private blockchain we will be featuring here on

the Akeo Tech Channel. Having already looked at Hyperledger Fabric and Corda

which you can check out here if you haven't seen already. JP Morgan's Quorum

seems like a good next step to take. Quorum like Hyperledger Fabric and

Corda is also a permissioned or a private blockchain. If you're unsure

about what a permission or private blockchain is, then please check out this video here

before you continue on with this one. Don't worry I will be here when you get back.

So without further ado let's dig in.

Quorum is a soft fork of

the public Ethereum blockchain meaning the vast majority of the overall Quorum

solution is actually unchanged Ethereum basecode. Some of the major issues when

it comes to using the Ethereum blockchain as an enterprise solution are

privacy, scalability and network performance. This is where the Quorum

protocol comes in. The primary features of Quorum include privacy - transactions

and smart contracts on the blockchain can be private

allowing fine-grained access only to participants that are involved in a

specific transaction or access to entities such as regulatory bodies.

This is of course alpha-omega for any enterprise blockchain solution as having

completely open and public ledger of transactions is not only unwanted but in

many business cases illegal in the eyes of regulators. Quorum features multiple

voting based consensus mechanisms which do away with the current proof

of work consensus mechanism used today by the public Ethereum blockchain among

many others. Quorum utilizes what is known as raft based and Istanbul

Byzantine fault tolerance consensus mechanisms. Quorum allows for peer or

node permissioning using smart contracts which ensures that only known parties

can join the network. And the last but certainly not the least of these primary

features of Quorum is increased scalability and network performance.

It goes without saying that this is a very important feature to have in any

enterprise grade blockchain solution especially one that is based on the

notoriously poorly scalable and relatively slow performing public

Ethereum blockchain. So how does JP Morgan and their Quorum developer

community achieve these features to get a basic understanding of how it works?

We need to take a look at the basic Quorum blockchain architecture which consists

of two main components. First is the Quorum Node - this is the soft fork of

what we know as the public Ethereum blockchain. Making Ethereum the

basecode and adding a thin layer on top which allows for those important

modifications like using voting based consensus mechanisms instead of

proof-of-work and allowing transactions and smart contracts to be privately executed.

The second component is known as Constellation - this is a two part

system in which the primary application is to implement the privacy features of Quorum.

So the first part of Constellation consists of Transaction Managers

that are responsible for transaction privacy. A transaction

manager stores and allows access to encrypted transaction data, exchanges

encrypted payloads with other participants transaction managers, but

they do not have access to any sensitive private keys. This is where the second

part of constellation comes in - the Enclave works with the transaction

manager to strengthen privacy by managing encryption and decryption in an

isolated way. The Enclave stores private keys and is essentially a virtual HSM or

Hardware Security Module which is an encryption method not at all new to the

business tech world. So to very quickly sum it up JP Morgan's Quorum solves the

privacy and performance issues that public blockchains like Ethereum

presents not just the financial sector but just about every enterprise use case

of blockchain. If you've been following along for the last few weeks then you

might be noticing a trend in the features provided by these different

blockchain solutions that we've covered. Privacy, immutability through coded trust,

scaling, performance, regulation ready. All these issues are being tackled by these

different blockchain projects. But one very important question still remains.

Which private blockchain is the right one for your business?

In the next episode on the Akeo Tech channel

this is the question that I want to help you answer.

To give you the best possible comparison we are gonna hop over next week.

So I'll be back in two weeks to answer this question. One thing I do want

to mention now there are a lot of different blockchain projects out there

that we haven't even began to look at. But, this channel is not really meant to

feature every blockchain project out there. Hyperledger Fabric, Corda, Quorum

are those projects that I decided that we should focus on and for very good

reasons which we will get into in a couple of weeks. All provide very similar

features but with very different architectural foundations

and very different communities of developers and support.

Which brings me to this week's critical thinking question.

Your business is in the process of choosing a

technical blockchain solution. The two choices you are deciding between seem to

be identical on paper. What other important aspect of these two

blockchains can you compare to help you make your technical decision?

There it is feel free to start a discussion in the comments section.

This week there is no one right or wrong answer so if you are brave enough please

share with the rest of us what you feel, you would be focused on if you had two

projects that were exactly the same on paper what would you compare that?

Are you interested in learning more about how blockchain is being used today and

what problems businesses are trying to solve with this technology.

Then head on over to Akeo.Tech, where you can download your free blockchain ebook for business

professionals. Are you enjoying the content here on the Akeo Tech channel.

I hope you are subscribe, like this video, share this channel with your family, your

friends, your colleagues. Help us to spread this valuable information, so we

can all do our part to assist in global blockchain adoption.

Thanks again for watching

I'll see you in a couple of weeks when we take a side by side by side look

at what we believe are the top three blockchain projects out there. We'll be

comparing Hyperledger Fabric hosted by the Linux Foundation,

Corda supported by industry organizations like Amazon Web Services

Intel and Microsoft and of course JP Morgan's Quorum

Thanks again for watching

Bye Bye