Opinion: JPMorgan exits Quorum over scalability constraints

The financial holding JPMorgan Chase has decided to sell ConsenSys’ blockchain platform Quorum due to fundamental shortcomings of Ethereum. This view was voiced by Will Martino, a former lead engineer of the bank’s early project named Juno.

In an interview Cointelegraph, the expert questioned whether Ethereum-based solutions can scale. He is convinced that Quorum was good for its time, but inherited Ethereum’s inherent limitations.

Martino believes that the size of JPMorgan’s strategic investment in ConsenSys, which became part of deal, exceeds the proceeds from the sale of Quorum. In his view, the bank shed a unit whose prospects looked unclear.

“Quorum was a real attempt to make Ethereum a blockchain technology for industrial use. But it has returned to its creators, who are unlikely to achieve much progress with it. For ConsenSys this is more of a brand, trademark and intellectual assets for marketing,” says the engineer.

According to Martino, the real problem with Quorum is that it does not scale, although it is a private Ethereum fork that is not tied to mining. The specialist believes the reason lies in the limitations of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

“If even JPMorgan couldn’t scale it for internal use, one might ask why this happened. The answer lies in the technology’s limitations,” says the engineer.

Martino, despite the disappointing results, doubts JPMorgan’s switch to Hyperledger, which he regards as inferior to Quorum.

In conclusion, the former employee noted that the group would postpone its blockchain deployment plans to 2021-2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

After leaving JPMorgan, Martino founded Kadena. In January this year the company launched its Kadena blockchain platform, enabling interoperability of smart contracts across private and public networks.

According to the developers, Kadena addresses the fundamental problem of scaling PoW networks without sacrificing decentralization.

Kadena’s PoW mainnet was launched in November 2019. It also announced that it had raised $20 million in a token sale.

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