New to Quorum? Start Here!
What is Quorum?
Quorum is a private / permissioned blockchain platform built for enterprise. It’s a fork of Go Ethereum client (geth), the official GoLang implementation of the Ethereum protocol, designed to process private transactions with a permissioned group of known participants. Since its development in 2015, Quorum is maintained by J.P. Morgan — so it’s enterprise-ready and able to clone straight from GitHub. If you want to go a little deeper, and get started as a Quorum developer — please check out “Getting Started with Quorum”, our GitHub, or these developer docs on our website.
Why Ethereum?
For those of you new to Ethereum — it can do some pretty exciting things. First of all, it’s not just a cryptocurrency — it is an open source platform for building decentralized applications (DApps) and a general platform for smart contract development. It also provides a decentralized virtual machine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which can execute scripts using a well distributed network of nodes. The virtual machine’s instruction set, in contrast to others, is thought to be Turing-complete. “Gas”, an internal transaction pricing mechanism, is used to mitigate spam and allocate resources on the network. To top it off, Ethereum touts the largest blockchain ecosystem with 4x more developers than other protocols — so there’s a lot of utility, collaboration, and progress within the community. Long story short — tons of people are building on top of Ethereum and bringing momentum to the project.
As mentioned previously, Quorum is a fork of Go Ethereum. During the early development of Quorum, it was realized that web 3.0 or future “internet of value” would bring huge changes to enterprises and industries. Ethereum already had inherent value and traction with its public network, a network where every transaction (and all participants of each transaction) are publicly available to anyone looking through its transaction history. However, inside an enterprise environment where parties/ nodes are exchanging large amounts of data, there is still a huge demand for privacy, speed and higher throughput—in addition to all the perks of public Ethereum’s smart contract features.
To build on top of this progress, Quorum added modifications that addressed these specific challenges to blockchain adoption within an enterprise environment such as a privacy manager to support private transactions, private and public EVM state so you can still use the same smart contracts that run on Ethereum, a permissioned network (consortium), and pluggable consensus. Quorum adds the ability to create private blockchains between known participants (selected parties), while also adding transaction privacy on top of normal Ethereum transactions. And yes, public Ethereum tools play nicely with Quorum (e.g. Truffle Suite, Remix IDE, MetaMask, web3j).
Quorum is being used in various industries…
We typically see use-cases for private/permissioned blockchains like Quorum where there exist industry problems that involve geographically distributed members, there’s spotty trust between those members, and no reason or need for central control among a group of known participants. When some of these conditions are met, we typically find solutions in value or supply chain systems where there are various parties involved in decision making that requires multi-party and organizational decision making via multi-sig contracts, real time auditing, operational transparency, and data integrity.
With this in mind, some of the many use-cases and applications using Quorum that span from Financial Services to Supply Chain, video game royalties to securing healthcare provider data, tracking gold bars to optimizing auto insurance claim subrogation. There’s a ton of projects out there using Quorum, so if you want to see them all — check out our list of 50+ Projects Building on J.P. Morgan’s Quorum Blockchain.
Here’s where you can start!
If you’re a developer exploring enterprise blockchain, a business leader seeking to use Quorum for your within your industry, or an existing member of our Quorum community — there’s plenty of resources available out there for you.
For developers..
- Join us on Slack
- Check out our developer docs
- Get started with Quorum Wizard or see our Quorum Examples
- Here’s our Product Roadmap
- Go to our Github
- Go through Quorum Docker containers
- See how a transaction is processed
- If you have questions — see our FAQ or Stack Exchange
- Here are some videos around Quorum
For business leaders…
I’m already familiar with Quorum, but want to do more…
Our goal is to encourage more developers and enterprises to adopt Quorum. We’re also on a mission to offer support for the 3k+ developers already using Quorum. If you have been a fan of Quorum, and would like to support the community — there is plenty of work to collaborate on.
Get involved in Slack
If you’re not already in our Slack — get on that. From there, go through our guidelines on “How to Slack” and our “Code of Conduct”. Once you understand the rules, help us inform newcomers of the system and promote Quorum-related content throughout the community by posting articles, sharing public Quorum projects, ask questions — again, there’s a lot we can do here.
Submit project
We are very interested to see who’s building what on Quorum and how we can support. If you’re building a DApp, integration, platform or API with Quorum, or you know of a team in your region using Quorum? Please feel free to reach out — we would be glad to support and answer any questions in Slack or email us at info@goquorum.com.
Evangelize quorum
If you want to take it a step further, and educate others on “how to get started” with Quorum — become an advocate. Our core engineering team will help bring you up to speed on all things Quorum — from releases to architecture, so that you feel comfortable sharing Quorum with your local communities.
Contribute 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 info@goquorum.com.
If you need any help getting started, please join us on our Quorum Slack community where our core engineering team is able to answer any technical support questions. Once you’re there, please reach out to me and say “hi” — I’m more than happy to hear what you’re working on!
Signing out.
Matt Wright
Community Lead, Quorum
**These are my personal views and not the views of my employer.
