JPMorgan Revamps Quroum’s Privacy Architecture With Microsoft’s Assistance

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) — one of the top three US banks with over $2.62 trillion investments under management— supposedly revamped its Quorum blockchain platform facilities with Microsoft’s assistance. Crypto media portal Coindesk revealed the latest update.

Over the past six months, software engineers spread across London, Singapore, and the US have “relaunched” Quorum, the major bank’s custom built variant of ethereum blockchain, said Oli Harris, JPM’s Quorum Head and Crypto-Asset Strategy.

Particularly, Constellation, Quorum’s privacy layer published in Haskell software language, was substituted by Tessera, which has a comparable architecture but is constructed in Java to render it simpler for companies to use and implement.

This initiative has begun behind the doors as the bank hogged limelight with JPM Coin. JPMorgan’s collaboration with Microsoft Azure Blockchain service was announced last week. Along the same lines, the reboot was intended to create Quorum accessible by a wider corporate world.

And that expanding the platform’s popularity in turn, enables get Quorum prepared for a feasible existence outside the bank, which has been contemplating project spin-off since early 2018.
Referring specifically to the Microsoft tie-up, Harris said:

“I would think of this as a stepping stone to a potential spin-out.”

Harris further elaborated as follows:

“It’s open source software, available on Github and maintained by JPMorgan on behalf of everyone using Quorum. The more users of Quorum, the better it is for everyone, because we can help with standardization and creating even more robust tech suite.”

Quorum is the private blockchain system based on the Ethereum covenant. As per Oli Harris, JPM chief of Quorum and crypto-asset strategst, coders worked to innovate Quorum’s privacy framework by combining its past Haskell-based privacy module Constellation with Java-based “Tessera” privacy transaction supervisor.

Harris is quoted as highlighting that innovation aims to create the Quorum platform simpler to adopt by a wider range of companies, stating that:

“It’s open source software, available on Github and maintained by JPMorgan on behalf of everyone using Quorum. The more users of Quorum, the better it is for everyone, because we can help with standardization and creating even more robust tech suite.”

Microsoft and JPMorgan’s engineers are reportedly further working to streamline node deployment on the platform and reducing its complexity, as well as developing options such as multiple consensus mechanisms and the provision of a modular menu bar of privacy solutions. Harris reportedly explained that the firms’ efforts are being undertaken so that:

“Companies like JPMorgan can actually focus on the business applications and unlocking value from the technology, whereas Quorum powered by Microsoft will be dealing with a lot of the heavy lifting.”

Harris additionally stressed that Quorum is intended to be multi-cloud, despite the bank’s comprehensive collaboration with Microsoft Azure cloud. As recently stated, Quorum became the first software to be administered using Microsoft’s current blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) software, Azure Blockchain Service.

Ever since, Microsoft has managed to introduce products for its Baas application including the Azure Blockchain Development Kit for Ethereum blockchain. As JPMorgan and Microsoft worked to advance Quorum’s technical specifications, the banking mammoth was mainly in the company’s spotlight for its lately launched blockchain-powered stablecoin, named JPMCoin.