Quorum is an Ethereum-based distributed ledger protocol with transaction/contract privacy and new consensus mechanisms.

Quorum is a fork of go-ethereum and is updated in line with go-ethereum releases.

Key enhancements over go-ethereum:

• Privacy - Quorum supports private transactions and private contracts through public/private state separation, and utilises peer-to-peer encrypted message exchanges (see Constellation and Tessera) for directed transfer of private data to network participants
• Alternative Consensus Mechanisms - with no need for POW/POS in a permissioned network, Quorum instead offers multiple consensus mechanisms that are more appropriate for consortium chains:
  • Raft-based Consensus - a consensus model for faster blocktimes, transaction finality, and on-demand block creation
  • Istanbul BFT - a PBFT-inspired consensus algorithm with transaction finality, by AMIS.
• Peer Permissioning - node/peer permissioning using smart contracts, ensuring only known parties can join the network
• Higher Performance - Quorum offers significantly higher performance than public geth

Architecture

The above diagram is a high-level overview of the privacy architecture used by Quorum. For more in-depth discussion of the components, refer to the wiki pages.

Quickstart

The quickest way to get started with Quorum is by following instructions in the Quorum Examples repository. This allows you to quickly create a network of Quorum nodes, and includes a step-by-step demonstration of the privacy features of Quorum.

Further Reading

Further documentation can be found in the docs folder and on the wiki.

See also

• Quorum: this repository
• Quorum Wiki
• quorum-examples: Quorum demonstration examples
• Quorum Community Slack Inviter: Quorum Slack community entry point
• Constellation: Haskell implementation of peer-to-peer encrypted message exchange for transaction privacy
• Tessera: Java implementation of peer-to-peer encrypted message exchange for transaction privacy
• Raft Consensus Documentation
• Istanbul BFT Consensus Documentation: RPC API and technical article
• ZSL wiki page and documentation
• quorum-tools: local cluster orchestration, and integration testing tool

Third Party Tools/Libraries

The following Quorum-related libraries/applications have been created by Third Parties and as such are not specifically endorsed by J.P. Morgan. A big thanks to the developers for improving the tooling around Quorum!

• Quorum Blockchain Explorer - a Blockchain Explorer for Quorum which supports viewing private transactions
• Quorum-Genesis - A simple CL utility for Quorum to help populate the genesis file with voters and makers
• Quorum Maker - a utility to create Quorum nodes
• QuorumNetworkManager - makes creating & managing Quorum networks easy
• ERC20 REST service - a Quorum-supported RESTful service for creating and managing ERC-20 tokens
• Nethereum Quorum - a .NET Quorum adapter
• web3j-quorum - an extension to the web3j Java library providing support for the Quorum API
• Apache Camel - an Apache Camel component providing support for the Quorum API using web3j library. Here is the artcile describing how to use Apache Camel with Ethereum and Quorum https://medium.com/@bibryam/enterprise-integration-for-ethereum-fa67a1577d43

Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Quorum!

Quorum is built on open source and we invite you to contribute enhancements. Upon review you will be required to complete a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before we are able to merge. If you have any questions about the contribution process, please feel free to send an email to quorum_info@jpmorgan.com.

License

The go-ethereum library (i.e. all code outside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING.LESSER file.

The go-ethereum binaries (i.e. all code inside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING file.