JPMorgan Overhauls Quroum’s Privacy Architecture With Help From Microsoft

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) — the United States’ largest bank with over $2.62 trillion in assets — has reportedly rehauled the infrastructure of its blockchain platform Quorum with the help of Microsoft. The development was reported by crypto media outlet Coindesk on May 9.

As reported, Quorum is JPM’s private blockchain platform built on the Ethereum protocol. According to JPM head of Quorum and crypto-assets strategy Oli Harris, developers have been working to innovate Quorum’s privacy architecture by replacing its former Haskell-based privacy engine Constellation with the Java-based “Tessera” privacy transaction manager.

Harris is cited as outlining that the innovation is intended to make the Quorum platform easier to implement by a broader spectrum of firms, noting 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 further underscored that Quorum is being designed to be multi-cloud, notwithstanding the bank’s extensive cooperation with Microsoft Azure cloud.

As recently reported, Quorum became the first platform that can be managed using Microsoft’s just-released new blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform, Azure Blockchain Service.

Microsoft has since then this week continued to roll out further tools for its Baas platform, including the Azure Blockchain Development Kit for the Ethereum blockchain.

As JPMorgan and Microsoft have been working to innovate the technical specifications of Quorum, the banking giant has largely been in the industry limelight for its recently unveiled  blockchain-powered stablecoin, dubbed JPMCoin.