Quorum Platform

Quorum is an open source platform. It is a soft fork, very well-known public Ethereum blockchain developed by J.P. Morgan, an American investment bank and financial service company. Quorum is a good solution for the issues like privacy, scalability and performance of the network when Ethereum blockchain is used. Quorum is an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum (Morgan, 2019). The Quorum platform is an ideal platform for any application that requires speedy transactions with high throughput for processing of private transactions in a permissioned-based network.

The primary features of Quorum include privacy. The transactions and the smart contract used in the blockchain can be private, and only authorized participants in a specific transaction are allowed, for the access to a transaction or access to bodies such a regulatory body.

Another feature of Quorum is voting based consensus mechanism which do away from current proof of work consensus mechanism used today by the public Ethereum blockchain among many others. Quorum utilizes Raft-Based (Diego Ongaro, 2014) and Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus mechanisms (Lin, 2017).

In Quorum, peer or node gets the permission using smart contracts. This ensures that only authorized participant joins the network.

Another important feature of Quorum is the increased scalability and the network performance. This is to note that this very important feature of a Quorum platform has, especially when it is for the relatively slow performing and poor scalability public Ethereum blockchain.

Now let us see how it works and concentrate of the basic Quorum blockchain architecture of which consists of two main components.

Quorum node: This is the soft fork of what we know as the public Ethereum blockchain, making the Ethereum as base code and adding a thin layer on the top, which allows the modifications like using voting-based consensus mechanism instead of proof of work and allowing transactions and smart contract to be privately executed.

Constellation: This is a two-part system, in which the primary focus is to implement the privacy features of Quorum.

The first part of constellation is a transaction manager who is responsible for the privacy of the transaction. The duty of transaction manager is to store and allows access to the encrypted transaction data; exchange the encrypted pay load with other participants transaction managers, but the transaction manager does not have access to any sensitive private key.

The second part of the constellation is the enclave. The enclave works with the transaction managers to strengthen the privacy by managing the encryption and decryption in an isolated manner. The enclave stores the private key and essentially a virtually HSM (hardware security module) which is an encryption method.

Stellar

Stellar is globally open source protocols for payments. Stellar is maintained by stellar development foundation in San Francisco in the year 2014. Stellar has some key features that need to be discussed. A stellar platform is a multicurrency network, any currency, asset, or a token can be issued directly inside of a stellar network.

The transactions happening in the stellar network get confirmed in less than five seconds. The fee required for the transaction is nominal as only a cent will be paid for 10,000 transactions, for example, a sequence of transaction would cost around 150 million dollars in a traditional network, whereas in a stellar network the cost would be only 20 cents.

The stellar platform is much more scalable than other DLT platforms because the stellar can process thousands of transactions in a second. In the stellar platform, the participant has the choice of choosing the participant they trust on the network out of several members present in the network.

A stellar reaches the consensus using two types of consensus. One is called local consensus and another is called global consensus. Further local consensus is called quorum slice and the global consensus is called quorum. It can be said that when there is enough of local consensus it would be a global consensus or in other words, a quorum arises when there is enough of quorum slice in the network.

In a stellar consensus mechanism, it is not necessary in global consensus that every participant agrees with everyone in the network but simply agreeing with the neighbor is enough for everyone.

The cryptocurrency of stellar network is Lumens (XLM) (Brett Roberts, 2018). The XLM are the native asset of the stellar network. The XLM is responsible for the real-time transfer of the value in the network and it acts as a bridge currency between the digital-fiat assets that are issued by the anchors.

Stellar decentralized ledger can be thought of as a database; a database that can store more than just account balances and payments. Another use case for this database is storing the offers to buy and sell the assets. All these offers represent on a global order book called decentralized exchange (DEX) (McCollom, 2018).

The best way to understand the stellar DEX is to compare it with the other exchanges like centralized exchange and exchange build on Ethereum.

In a centralized the private key is stored on a centralized server, which we know had been hacked in past.

In Ethereum DEX the private key is stored in the smart contracts, but this also has some hacking history but in stellar, the user is not controlling their private keys rather the user is controlling their money.

A stellar has an order book and offer match making built in at the protocol level. The on-ledger offers are a simple addition to the decentralized database.

Thus, we have seen there are some difference between the stellar and the Ethereum platform. We can summarize the difference including the Bitcoin in Table 8.1.

Multichain

A multichain technology is another kind of open platform that helps the users in developing a private blockchain that could be useful for any organizations in their financial transactions. A multichain technology provides an API and a commandline interface, which helps in preserving and setting up of multichain (Sharma, 2017b).

TABLE 8.1

Comparison of Execution of Transaction on Platforms Ethereum and Stellar with Bitcoin

Objective of Multichain: In the blockchain environment the visibility of the blockchain should always be shared with the active users so that there would be no confusion among the participants which ensures the complete stability and control over the transaction. The proof of work consensus algorithm can be useful in the process mining. In a multichain, two or more parties can create their own blockchain but there would only single blockchain for entire bit coin network. The transactions happening in the multichain network cannot be accessible by any third party unless there is permission from the administrator. Whereas, the transactions happening with bitcoin are open to anyone but the proof of work consensus algorithm is optional in a multichain environment. The value of the Bitcoin is only because of the proof of work involved in it. Since there is no proof of work associated in multichain,the transaction cost is very low. Since the multichain network is a private type of network, there has to be valid permissions for the miners to be able to mine multichain blocks.

Hand-Shaking Process in Multichain: Hand-shaking is a process in which the nodes in the network connect and communicate with each other. The same process happens in a multichain environment when the nodes in the block- chain connect with each other. The nodes present in the blockchain identify each other with the IP address and the list of permissions a node have. With this each node can send message to other nodes; however, the P2P connection aborts if the process is not delivering any satisfying results.