Consensys Blockchain company acquires JP Morgan's Quorum

ConsenSys, an industry-leading blockchain software company, has acquired Quorum®, an enterprise-variant of the Ethereum blockchain developed by J.P. Morgan (NYSE: JPM). With the addition of Quorum, ConsenSys now offers a full range of products, services, and support for Quorum, accelerating the availability of features and capabilities—such as digital asset functionality and document management.

J.P. Morgan and ConsenSys are two leading organizations in Enterprise Ethereum and have a long history of collaboration after leading the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, helping bring a Mainnet Ethereum client, Hyperledger Besu, to The Linux Foundation, and working together on industry applications built on Quorum, such as komgo and Covantis. Since the launch of Quorum in 2016, ConsenSys and J.P. Morgan have collaborated to make Ethereum the platform of choice for enterprises building secure and customizable business networks at scale.

“The creation of Quorum was a first for J.P. Morgan, both in terms of developing its own blockchain protocol, and open sourcing software for the developer community,” said Umar Farooq, Global Head of Blockchain, J.P. Morgan. “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.”

ConsenSys will merge its existing protocol engineering roadmap with Quorum, leveraging the best of both codebases. All Enterprise Ethereum protocol technology at ConsenSys will 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 leading blockchain products, such as Codefi’s finance and commerce application suite. J.P. Morgan will be a customer of ConsenSys’ advanced features and services deployed on Quorum.

“Even before the very first block on Ethereum was mined and ConsenSys was formed, we’ve collaborated with J.P. Morgan on Ethereum proofs of concept and production systems. We are enormously excited to onboard Quorum into the ConsenSys Enterprise Ethereum stack, and look forward to unifying our Hyperledger Besu-based Enterprise Ethereum client with Quorum, and supporting all of the Quorum installations globally. We look forward to continuing our multifaceted partnership with J.P. Morgan for many years and ushering in an era of enterprise and mainnet compatibility,” said Joseph Lubin, Founder and CEO of ConsenSys and Co-creator of Ethereum.

In addition to ConsenSys’ acquisition of the Quorum, J.P. Morgan made a strategic investment in ConsenSys to support its mission to help developers build next-generation networks and enable enterprises to launch more powerful financial infrastructure.