Introduction to Quorum Blockchain [Primary Features, Architecture, and Use Cases]

In this Blockchain tutorial, we will discuss what is Quorum Blockchain. And we will discuss some of its primary features. Moreover, we will also illustrate the following set of topics.

1. Introduction to Quorum Blockchain
2. Need for Quorum Blockchain
3. Who developed Quorum Blockchain
4. Primary features of Quorum Blockchain
5. Disadvantages Of Quorum Blockchain
6. Architecture of Quorum Blockchain
7. Use Cases of Quorum Blockchain
8. Companies Using Quorum

Introduction to Quorum Blockchain

Blockchain or specifically DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology), is one of the most significant technological advancements in recent years.

Also, it is entirely understandable that this technology is capable of fulfilling a variety of functions in various industries.

Over time, many blockchain systems have emerged, each with its own set of consensus and encryption techniques. And Quorum is one of them.

Quorum is a popular blockchain platform that has garnered a lot of traction in recent years. As a result, there has been a surge in interest in Quorum blockchain use cases.

Quorum is a blockchain platform for businesses that is open source. It is based upon Ethereum Blockchain with some differences in terms of features and functionality.

With Quorum, the main goal is to create a permissioned Ethereum implementation that enables transactions as well as contract privacy. It also incorporates several good enterprise features.

These enterprise features are primarily designed to provide enterprise-level privacy, performance, and permissioning.

Read Hashgraph vs Blockchain

Need for Quorum Blockchain

When it comes to Blockchain and its application in the financial sector, there are a few issues to be concerned about. These issues include information control, complete public transparency, and access.

Still, compared to the traditional banking system, blockchain provides benefits such as immutability and easy traceability. But, relying on a system where all data is open to the public is inconvenient.

Aside from that, these companies are concerned about the possibility of being exposed to smart contracts.

Smart contracts are noted for providing greater efficiency while also lowering expenses when compared to traditional business solutions.

Existing smart contract solutions that use replicated shared ledgers lack the requisite data privacy capabilities.

Quorum is created to eliminate any concerns about blockchain. Also, another reason is to fill in the holes in blockchain and create a dependable and trustworthy blockchain platform.

In Quorum, a simpler approach to privacy, along with some features of Ethereum is utilized.

Read What is Corda Blockchain and Introduction to Polkadot Blockchain

Who developed Quorum Blockchain

JP Morgan developed Quorum intending to advance blockchain technology in the financial industry.

Now, it is quite clear that many big financial businesses are interested in blockchain technology. And J.P. Morgan Chase, one of the world’s premier investment banks, has taken the lead in this area.

Quorum was created by JP Morgan and the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. It is a private blockchain that serves the financial sector with blockchain solutions.

However, JP Morgan and ConsenSys announced on August 25th, 2020 that the Quorum open source project would be acquired and operated by ConsenSys headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. And this step was taken as part of JPMorgan’s strategic investment.

Read Introduction to Blockchain Mining

Primary features of Quorum Blockchain

Till now, we got a clear idea about is Quorum Blockchain. Next, let’s understand some of the key features that Quorum Blockchain provides.

1. Open Source

Quorum is an open-source project with over 400 active contributors working on its development.

2. Permission Management

One of the most notable features of Quorum is that it is a permissioned system. This implies that that the Quorum network will not be open to everyone.

This network can only be accessed by validated and authorized individuals. And the trade only takes place between participants who have been pre-approved by an authority.

3. Better Privacy

In Quorum, it utilizes the concept of public and private transactions. A public or open transaction is similar to how it is implemented in Ethereum. However private transactions are private and data is not available to the public.

Constellation is one of the fundamental elements that separates Quorum from Ethereum or other blockchain platforms. It enslaves the messages to protect them.

Moreover, previous transactions’ authenticity and authentications are present in this enclave. It also contains the majority of cryptographically intensive work, making it a secure and safe process.

4. Better performance

When it comes to transaction speed, Quorum outperforms its competitors like Bitcoin and Ethereum by a wide margin. Quorum has a transaction rate of more than 150 per second which is significantly more than Bitcoin and Ethereum.

As a result, Quorum is the preferred option for banks and other financial institutions. Its great speed is due to its simple consensus system, which allows for faster transactions.

Quorum employs RAFT consensus for fault tolerance and IBFT consensus for Byzantine fault tolerance by default, which is significantly faster than proof of work consensus.

5. Transaction pricing

Quorum does not utilize the idea of gas to increase the cost of a transaction. Running transactions on the quorum network does not require any crypto charges. The Quorum code was forked from Ethereum, and the gas usage is zero.

6. Consensus Algorithm

In comparison to another blockchain-based approach. Quorum uses a voting-based consensus method known as QuorumChain.

This consensus mechanism uses smart contracts to assign voting privileges to others. Also, it keeps track of the status of all voting nodes at the same time.

However, in the voting process, only a few selected nodes are granted the ability to vote. This aids in transaction verification. And for improved fault tolerance, Quorum employs Istanbul BFT and Raft-based models.

Read Tokenization in Blockchain

Disadvantages Of Quorum Blockchain

After going through various features of Quorum, it’s time to also understand some of the issues with Quorum Blockchain.

• Lack of Support: The interest in Blockchain technology and its application are increasing day by day. But still, the concept of enterprise blockchain is new to the world. And due to this, there are very few professionals available in this area. Similarly, Quorum has fewer developers and collaborators, the amount of aid and support is limited.
• Privacy & Scalability: The Quorum employees a channel-based approach for privacy. But, this approach also poses privacy and scalability concerns.
• Lack of crypto-economics: With Quorum, it is not possible to create native money or a digital token. This is because consensus is not established through mining and it does not require any cryptocurrency.

Read Introduction to Enterprise Blockchain

Architecture of Quorum Blockchain

Quorum is essentially an enterprise version of the public Ethereum client. it offers privacy features, enterprise permissioning, and better performance in a permissioned network.

Now, to understand the complete working of this Quorum Blockchain, first, we need to understand its architecture.

Now, the complete Quorum Blockchain architecture consists of various components. Let’s understand each component in detail.

Quorum node

The Quorum node is a lightweight fork of Geth And it is mainly designed to enable connections from permission nodes. Because it is a fork of Geth, it continues to benefit from ongoing research and development in the Ethereum community.

Next, let’s understand some of the key aspects related to the Quorum node.

• Enhanced P2P: In this, the peer-to-peer (P2P) layer has been changed to allow only authorized nodes to connect to one other.
• Enhanced state: There is also a Merkle Patricia state trie for the private state in addition to the public state trie.
• Pluggable consensus: Instead of employing Proof-of-Work, the consensus is reached using the RAFT, PoA, or Istanbul BFT algorithms. Because all of these multiple protocols are available, it gives the freedom to select any of them based on business requirements.
• No transaction fees: Since transaction fees are unnecessary in consortium networks, gas pricing has been set to zero.
• Private transactions: The transaction creation process has been changed to allow the hash of the encrypted payload instead of transaction data.
• Block generation mechanism: The block generation logic has been changed to include a new ‘global public state root‘ check in place of the previous ‘global state root‘ check.
• Block validation mechanism: The block validation mechanism has been changed to use the ‘global public state root‘ instead of the ‘global state root‘ in the block header.
• RPC API: Additional RPC APIs are supported by Quorum, allowing us to deal with the improved enterprise features of Quorum, such as permissioning and consensus processes.

Privacy Manager

The privacy manager is an off-chain mechanism in the Quorum network that ensures transaction privacy.

This component enables Quorum nodes to securely communicate transaction payload between the authorized parties. It mainly consists of two parts: the transaction manager and the enclave.

Transaction Manager

The transaction manager is a stateless and restful service that is mainly responsible for the operations listed below.

• Stores and enables access to encrypted transaction data.
• Exchanges encrypted payloads with transaction managers on other nodes.
• Identifying other transaction managers in the Quorum network.

There are two types of transaction managers introduced by Quorum namely Constellation and Tessera. Now, Constellation is the first Haskell-based privacy manager. However, currently, it is no longer developed in preference of Tessera.

Tessera is a more feature-rich Java-based privacy manager. And it enables storage, encryption, decryption, and propagation of private transaction data.

Enclave

The Enclave collaborates with the Transaction Manager to improve privacy by managing cryptographic processes independently.

An enclave is an independent component that delivers cryptographic services for transaction payload encryption and decryption. It can only be linked with its transaction manager on a one-to-one basis.

Read Introduction to Blockchain Oracles

Use Cases of Quorum Blockchain

Now that we got brief regarding Quorum Blockchain and its architecture, let’s, discuss some of the use cases of Quorum Blockchain.

Healthcare

One important domain in which the application of quorum blockchain can be seen is healthcare. And in the field of healthcare, the most significant application of the blockchain is the management of healthcare provider data.

Synaptic Healthcare Alliance is the most well-known example of quorum blockchain in the healthcare business.

The main goal of this project is to create an industry-wide database for healthcare providers. And this project will try to address the issues surrounding healthcare provider data management.

Supply Chain

In recent years, the vast range of uses of blockchain in supply chain management has gotten a lot of attention. Supply chain management offers more flexibility for various quorum use cases.

Automated inventory management and shipment tracking are just two of the areas where quorum may help with supply chain applications.

Furthermore, most blockchain application cases in supply chain management focus on ensuring the authenticity of expensive goods.

Starbucks is an excellent example of supply chain tracking using quorum blockchain. It was effective in applying quorum in conjunction with Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain Service to measure coffee production.

Finance Sector

Financial services are the most promising area for discovering quorum blockchain application cases. The usefulness of blockchain in finance is enhanced by Quorum’s various uses in the financial services sector.

For example, Block Ledger is an example of a decentralized accounting ledger system that uses the BaaS (Blockchain-as-a-Service) concept to use the quorum blockchain.

The following are some of the most well-known quorum blockchain applications in banking and finance.

• Trade finance
• Tokenized cash
• Institutional trading
• Supply chain finance

Enterprise Solutions

The Quorum blockchain is an excellent tool for assisting with the optimization of existing business operations and processes. Moreover, there are various unique use cases for improvising help with technological solutions in the context of a quorum example of corporate solutions.

For example, ProofSuite is a demonstration of how the blockchain may be used to support financial technology research and development.

Read Smart Contracts in Blockchain

Companies Using Quorum

Till now, we got a clear idea about what is Quorum blockchain and where are its general use cases. Now, when we consider various features and design concepts, we will get to know about a variety of profitable application cases.

Now, the question arises if there is any company using the blockchain platform. So, the answer is “Yes“, and there are many big enterprises who are utilizing the Quorum Blockchain. The list containing some big names is given below.

You may like the following blockchain tutorials:

• Blockchain Uses Other than Currencies
• Digital Signature in Blockchain
• Cryptography in Blockchain
• Consensus in Blockchain
• Decentralization in Blockchain
• What is Cardano Blockchain

So, in this tutorial, we have discussed what is Quorum Blockchain. And we have also illustrated the following set of topics related to Quorum Blockchain.

1. Introduction to Quorum Blockchain
2. Need for Quorum Blockchain
3. Who developed Quorum Blockchain
4. Primary features of Quorum Blockchain
5. Disadvantages Of Quorum Blockchain
6. Architecture of Quorum Blockchain
7. Use Cases of Quorum Blockchain
8. Companies Using Quorum