Will Martino, the former lead engineer for JPMorgan's Quorum blockchain,
shared insights into the project's acquisition by ConsenSys with
Cointelegraph. He believes that while the technology was good for its
time, it inherited fundamental flaws from Ethereum (ETH).
Martino was involved in the earliest iteration of the project, back
when it was still called "Juno". Since leaving JPMorgan, he has gone on
to found Kadena, a proof-of-work blockchain that employs sharding to
achieve scalability.

While details regarding ConsenSys' recent acquisition of Quorum are sparse, it was noted that
while divesting Quorum, JPMorgan was making an investment in ConsenSys.
Martino believes that the investment that the bank made was higher than
the price tag of Quorum. He suggests that this might have been an easy
way for JPMorgan to get rid of a business unit that was not going
anywhere:

"Quorum was a real attempt at making Ethereum technology
stick in an industrial setting. But it's being re-homed and I really
don't think there's going to be a lot of progress down the line from
ConsenSys. From my point of view, I think they're mostly buying the
brand and being able to just use the Quorum trademark and intellectual
assets from that point of view for marketing."

Martino says that
the real issue with Quorum is that it just does not scale. This may come
as a surprise considering that it is built as a private fork of
Ethereum and as such, does not involve mining. However, according to
Martino, the issue lies deeper, stemming from the Ethereum Virtual
Machine, or EVM:


"So when you take something like the
EVM, which was never the bottleneck on a public blockchain and you put
it onto a private chain, all of a sudden, it can very easily become the
bottleneck. And as one of the reasons that the Quorum had a lot of
trouble just performing more than (the numbers I have heard) between two
hundred and thousand transactions per second."

Martino
says his skepticism about Ethereum and its derivative technologies
comes from both personal experience and talking to a lot of people in
the enterprise space who have experimented with it:


"If
JPMorgan, one of the biggest companies ever, can't drive adoption, even
when they have a great internal use case, you have to ask yourself
'why'? And my answer to that is the technology is just fundamentally
limited. And if you go and talk to other large system integrators, large
consultancies, you'll hear very, very similar things. So long as you
don't have someone who holds a lot of the Ethereum tokens as the head of
Blockchain for the company, you're going to find that people say: 'We
have tried using Ethereum, it just doesn't work'."

It
is unclear whether JPMorgan has lost interest in blockchain technology
altogether or just in this specific in-house experiment. Martino does
not believe that the bank will switch to Hyperledger's Fabric; a popular
solution for enterprise companies. In his opinion, it is even worse
than Quorum, which he referred to as being "best in class" at one point.
Besides Kadena, Martino says that Near could also be a viable option.
Yet he believes that the pandemic has slowed enterprise blockchain adoption. He noted that we may not see another major push until 2021-2022.

source link :  https://cointelegraph.com/news/quorum-s-creator-says-the-project-was-going-nowhere-jpmorgan-wanted-rid-of-it