Hyperledger Challenges JPMorgan's Quorum for Enterprise Ethereum Crown

Besu has the clout to potentially eclipse all the other enterprise versions of ethereum, including megabank JPMorgan's Quorum.

On the face of it, there's plenty of Kumbaya refrains being sung around the ethereum campfire, with engineers at Quorum helping sponsor the inclusion of Besu into Hyperledger.

Take ethereum stalwarts Adhara, an important application builder in the wholesale payments space, that recently flipped from using Quorum to Besu.

"Besu has very serious enterprise-grade support agreement which is easy to access. The Quorum team is very focused on JPMorgan projects, so we are not finding the same level of response from them."

It's probably fair to say that the popularity of Quorum caught the bank by surprise and there have been recurrent rumblings about JPMorgan spinning out the platform.

On the question of project support, a source close to JPMorgan's Quorum engineering team said Adhara's decision to seek more help from Hyperledger was a "Fair point." But the source stated that there is "a clear separation" between the Quorum engineering team and the bank's use cases team, which looks after things like JPM Coin.

Developers on the Quorum side would probably point out that the bank chose a fork of the mainnet Go ethereum client, which has been running most of the network and had more adoption and testing than anything else.

Another wrinkle concerns the slightly different versions of the Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm run by Quorum and Besu, with the latter laying claim to a newer version, dubbed IBFT2.

Khan said JPMorgan Quorum has been a huge vote of confidence in ethereum and made it front-page news, but said of the discomfort: "I don't think it's particular to JPMorgan; I think you see a challenge in the blockchain industry when any one company starts a consortium."

Quorum is intimately linked with the Go ethereum client and falls under General Public License.