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After years of collaboration, New York-based blockchain business ConsenSys has agreed to acquire JP Morgan’s open-source blockchain project Quorum.
ConsenSys has announced plans to acquire open-source project Quorum, an enterprise variant of the Ethereum blockchain developed by JP Morgan. As part of the deal, JP Morgan is also making a strategic investment in the New York-based blockchain start-up.
Neither party disclosed the value of the deal. In a statement, ConsenSys said that the acquisition marks a “major step” in the acceleration of enterprise adoption of blockchain technology and Ethereum-based solutions. It will be offering the investment bank’s technology under a new name, ConsenSys Quorum.
ConsenSys said that it will now offer a full range of products, services and support for the open-source project, accelerating the availability of features and capabilities such as digital asset functionality and document management.
The start-up’s latest acquisition comes just a few months after it announced plans to acquire blockchain tech company Fluidity, following a joint venture between the two businesses.
The acquisition
ConsenSys and JP Morgan have worked together before on industry applications that have been built on Quorum, such as Komgo and Covantis, and the two companies led the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
Umar Farooq, global head of blockchain at JP Morgan, said: “The creation of Quorum was a first for JP Morgan, both in terms of developing its own blockchain protocol and open-sourcing software for the developer community. We’re incredibly proud of the usage of Quorum over the past few years and are excited to have ConsenSys as a partner to take the vision forward.”
CoinDesk reported that as more projects began building on Quorum “it became obvious to many in the blockchain world that a a bank isn’t the right place to maintain a large scale open-source software project”.
ConsenSys said that it will merge its existing protocol engineering roadmap with Quorum. All enterprise Ethereum protocol technology at the company will now fall under the ConsenSys Quorum brand and developers will have the option to choose their underlying technology stack.
Quorum will remain open source and become interoperable with ConsenSys’ other blockchain products, such as Codefi’s finance and commerce application suite.
Joseph Lubin, CEO of ConsenSys and co-creator of Ethereum, said: “Even before the very first block on Ethereum was mined and ConsenSys was formed, we’ve collaborated with JP Morgan on Ethereum proofs of concept and production systems.”
Lubin said that the company is “enormously exited” to onboard Quorum into its production systems and looks forward to unifying its Hyperledger Besu-based enterprise Ethereum client with the acquired technology.
