Blockchain is the most talked-about term in the world of technology nowadays. While this technology is the core element of cryptocurrency that has taken over the financial market, its use is not limited to crypto and has many more use-cases. Over the years, different blockchain platforms have been developed with their own consensus mechanisms and encryption methods.
One such platform is the Quorum blockchain, which has gained popularity in recent times. This is because of the long-list of use-cases that quorum provides to its users.
Understanding The Basics About Quorum Blockchain
The Quorum network is based on a fork of the Ethereum blockchain. It is a permissioned or private DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology). Its main purpose is to provide a permissioned implementation of the Ethereum blockchain that supports contract privacy and transactions. The highlight of this network is its new feature called “private transaction identifier” that ensures data privacy. The primary objective of building Quorum is to utilize the existing technology as much as possible. Thus, even if the Ethereum network undergoes different upgrades in the future, there would be little to no changes in the quorum blockchain to maintain the sync between them.
Need For Quorum Blockchain
People in the crypto industry are quite familiar with the term-smart contract. These are used to bring out efficiency in the current enterprise system, reducing the costs alongside. But smart contracts lack in terms of data privacy due to replicated shared ledgers. This is because all the data and transactions of smart contracts are clearly visible on the shared ledgers.
The introduction of the quorum blockchain helped in overcoming this issue as it included new features such as cryptographic protocols, zero-knowledge proofs, homographic encryption, etc. Quorum is keeping the essence of Ethereum and utilizing the simple approach to privacy to satisfy the users.
How Quorum Is Different From Ethereum:
- Enhanced management and contract privacy: The permissioned nature of the Quorum blockchain makes it a favorable concept for privacy measures as compared to other blockchains. Quorum has a concept of private and public transactions. The public transactions are stored openly, similar to Ethereum, but the private transactions are kept confidential, not exposing the data to the public. Another key feature of Quorum that secures messages in the blockchain by enslaving them is called: constellation. It includes strict authentication, even of the previous transactions.
- Network and peer permissions management: As discussed above, quorum is permissioned, thus it is not open to all. Only a few authorized and validated people can be a part of this network. Thus, the exchanges take place here among people who have been pre-approved by a designated authority.
- Better performance: Quorum is far superior to any other blockchain technology when it comes to the speed of the network. More than 100 transactions can be carried out per second, making this network the ideal choice for banking and financial services. The high speed of this network is due to its simple consensus mechanism.
- Voting-based consensus mechanism: Quorum network is based on voting-based consensus mechanism also known as QuorumChain. Voting rights are assigned to all of its members through smart contracts. The status of all voting nodes is also tracked by quorumchain.
Use-Cases Of Quorum Blockchain:
- Banking
- Insurance
- Digital identity
- Healthcare
- Governance and public sector
- Supply chain
- Media and Entertainment
- Enterprise solution
- Blockchain data analytics
- Travel and Hospitality
Quorum is already being used by some major organizations across the globe, such as ING Group, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, Novartis, Microsoft, etc. We can expect this network to only grow in the near future due to its promising scope in enterprise, banking, supply chain management, and insurance.
Conclusion:
Although this network is permissioned and thus has a restricted mechanism, it is highly suitable for banking and financial institutions. This can be used to eliminate the trust issues that the banking system has with blockchain and its subsidiaries. Thus, this technology can successfully pave the way for mass adoption of blockchain technology.
