JP Morgan Chase unveils new blockchain
And another one…
JP Morgan Chase is developing its own blockchain, called Quorum, on the Ethereum network.
Amber Baldet, program lead, blockchain centre of excellence, JP Morgan Chase, says it is working with Ethereum “because it has been around a while and banks are familiar with it”.
With Quorum, the firm says all public and private smart contracts are derived from a single, common, complete blockchain of transactions validated by every node in the network.
This won’t be an open-for-all network, as the nodes that run Quorum must get permission from a higher authority to join.
In a presentation at the technical steering committee meeting of the Hyperledger Project, David Voell, engineering lead, CIB Emerging Technologies, JP Morgan Chase, says the technology swaps out private transaction data for cryptographic hashes, condensed and scrambled versions of that data, which conceals their true contents. In additions, both the public and private data reside on the blockchain, but they are parsed separately.
“The key to this whole thing, again, is a single blockchain of everyone continuously checking the integrity,” Voell says. But he adds there is still a “clear separation between private and public”.
The firm plans to open source the documentation and code base behind Quorum by the end of this year.
The race
Earlier this year, JP Morgan Chase unveiled “Juno” – a “distributed cryptoledger”. This provides support for a smart contract language called “Hopper” within a permissioned ledger network. The project has lost two team leaders, and gone a bit quiet. However, the bank says it is one of many projects it is working on.
Yesterday (5 October), Thomson Reuters launched BlockOne ID to let developers build applications in a controlled environment with blockchain. BlockOne ID (for Ethereum) is an experimental user-entitlement framework through which decentralised app (DApp) owners can manage access to their blockchain contracts.
