Quorum is "an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum" that aims to provide network permissioning and transaction privacy as well as higher performance. One of our teams has worked deeply with Quorum; however, their experience so far hasn't been great. Some challenges result from complex smart contract programming and some come from Quorum itself. For example, it doesn't work well with load balancers and only has partial database support, which will lead to significant deployment burden. We faced some stability and compatibility issues especially on private transactions. Quorum recently attracted a lot of attention because of JPM Coin. However, from a tech perspective, we recommend being cautious when implementing Quorum while keeping an eye on its development.
Ethereum is the leading developer ecosystem in blockchain tech. We've seen emerging solutions that aim to spread this technology into enterprise environments that usually require network permissioning and transaction privacy as well as higher throughput and lower latency. Quorum is one of these solutions. Originally developed by J.P. Morgan, Quorum positions itself as "an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum." Unlike the Hyperledger Burrow node, which creates a new Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), Quorum forks code from Ethereum's official client so that it can evolve alongside Ethereum. Although it keeps most features of the Ethereum ledger, Quorum changes the consensus protocol from PoW to more efficient ones and adds private transaction support. With Quorum, developers can use their Ethereum knowledge of using, for example, Solidity and Truffle contracts to build enterprise blockchain applications. However, based on our experience, Quorum is not yet enterprise ready; for example, it lacks access control for private contracts, doesn't work well with load balancers and only has partial database support, all of which will lead to significant deployment and design burden. We recommend that you're cautious in implementing Quorum while keeping an eye on its development.
