Quorum Review and Rating

SVET
2 min readFeb 18, 2019
“Quorum.01” Anastasia Palchukevich

Quorum Whitepaper v0.1 is authored by JP Morgan backed team of writers in 2017 and introduces the forked, permissioned version of go-Ethereum.

QuorumChain uses RAFT consensus, which is, basically, a newer, streamlined variety of the ancient Paxos protocol. A “leader” node periodically replicates a log to its “followers”, which can re-vote this leader if “heart-beat” messages (each 150–300 ms.) stop to be generated by him. Adding centralized management features on top of that old architecture doesn’t improve in my eyes the “Engineering” sub-rating of Quorum. Result: “b-”

I set Quorum’s “Security” to “b-”, as well, because, although, it’s based on an appraised system design and heavily relies on transactions cryptography as well as storage segmentation, I’m not a big fun of Quorum’s classical “corporate” manner of “playing” with data. Besides, we do not really know how it practically works, not to mention, that it’s already became a bad habit for banks to loose carefully “compartmentalized” information because some anonymous clerk turns to be a new victim of an old social-engineering attack.

Citing: “Tests of Quorum have demonstrated throughput of dozens to hundreds of transaction per second”. Hence: “c+” for “Velocity”.

We can’t, obviously, expect that the big bank will run over its head to assure the “Transparency” of its permissioned network and I give it “c+” only to formally recognize JPM’s people attempt to step out from their “comfort zone”.

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“Security-Velocity-Engineering-Transparency” sub-rating: [b-c+b-c+].

Note: JPM Coin, announced on the Valentine’s Day (14 Feb, 2019) by JPMorgan Chase, is issued on top of the QuorumChain.

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByEXXlwyI4z7VlVPQzktOEtRNzA/view

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SVET

Angel Investor (20+ years), Serial Entrepreneur (14+ companies), Author (> 1M views), Founder of Evernomics, 40+ Countries