ConsenSys Acquires JPMorgan's Blockchain Quorum

Quorum, the corporate blockchain platform developed by JPMorgan Chase bank, has been acquired by ConsenSys, the Ethereum venture capital firm based in Brooklyn, New York.

Additionally, JPMorgan has made a investment strategy at ConsenSys, the companies said in a statement. Neither ConsenSys nor JPMorgan confirmed the extent of the investment made by the bank.

ConsenSys confirmed that they are raising funds and have a number of additional investors joining JPMorgan. In terms of how the acquisition will be integrated into the Ethereum conglomerate, from now on, JPMorgan will be a client of ConsenSys, which offers software support and services to projects implemented on Quorum.

All corporate work done at ConsenSys will now fall under the new “ConsenSys Quorum” brand and ConsenSys plans to merge its existing protocol engineering roadmap with Quorum, taking advantage of the best of both code bases.

ConsenSys Quorum

Quorum is a privacy-focused fork of Ethereum. In recent times, it has become obvious to many in the blockchain world that a bank is not the place for a large-scale open source software project.

Bringing Quorum to Brooklyn was an idea that had existed since February of this year. JPMorgan and CEO Jamie Dimon made many statements for the “JPM Coin” project, which is tokenized money registered on Quorum.

Other high-profile initiatives within the bank include the Interbank Information Network, which has over 200 different banks as members, and Dromaius, a debt issuing platform on Quorum.

"Starting today, JPM Coin will be built on ConsenSys Quorum," said ConsenSys Chief Engineering Daniel Heyman. "So although JPM Coin is 100% owned by JPMorgan, we are very excited that we will support it as a software provider and help make it successful, as well as other projects such as the Interbank Information Network."

Other projects on Quorum - such as the tokenized loans made by IHS Markit or AURA, the track-and-trace system built by LVMH - will not receive any funding from ConsenSys, Heyman said, but will be online for other benefits.

“Anyone who relies on Quorum will have an appropriate software provider behind their technology,” said Heyman. "They will receive a very explicitly publicly endorsed roadmap to build upon and move towards, and a suite of features and functionality they can now purchase to accelerate their time to market."

The importance of interoperability

Another important factor for ConsenSys is the interoperability between Quorum and Hyperlegder Besu. The latter is a corporate Ethereum client built by ConsenSys engineers to be compatible with the public Ethereum mainnet.

The JPMorgan news was welcomed by Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Hyperledger, who expressed enthusiasm and positivity from the corporate blockchain community.

"This is the best textbook open source 'cooperation', where competitors can realize that they are actually stronger working together than trying to divide a market," Behlendorf said.