Hyperledger Vs Quorum: Which Will Rule the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance?

When it comes to enterprise blockchain platforms, three names are surely to come to one’s mind: Hyperledger, JP Morgan’s Quorum and Corda. As reported by CoinDesk, it seems like Hyperledger and Quorum are currently in their own race to see who will become the leader of the crowd. It turns out, the final verdict may rest in a number of projects including Besu and Adhara.

A Brief Overview

Initially created by PegSys and named Pantheon, two months ago, Hyperledger revealed that Pantheon is now a project on its platform called Besu reports Ledger Insights. Besu is a project designed to serve both private and public chains and is considered a way for enterprises to evolve towards public blockchains. The advantages don’t stop there, as it also supports Java language, which is the foundation for most businesses.

Given that Besu has created a tough competition for Quorum, it seems like Adhara’s Khokha project is also changing directions. Having used Quorum’s test zero-knowledge proofs in the project for the South African Reserve Bank, as reported by the news outlet, it has now selected Besu.

What Experts Are Saying Regarding Besu

The Co-Founder of Adhara, Peter Munnings was quoted stating that the decision to change clients rest in Besu’s accessibility and the lack of prioritization for the Adhara project.

In particular, he said:

“Besu has very serious enterprise-grade support agreement which is easy to access. The Quorum team is very focused on JPMorgan projects, so we are not finding the same level of response from them.”

In response to Munnings comes an unnamed source on behalf of JPMorgan’s team. Said source supposedly noted that Munnings decision to switch is a “fair point,” adding that one should keep note of the clear distinction between Quorum’s engineering team and the bank’s use cases team.

That said, the size of both teams is clearly not comparable. For instance, we have Quorum’s team that consists of 20 engineers, versus Besu, a platform continuously watched out by nearly 40 engineers, 71 staffers and the obvious support from Hyperledger. Hence, it doesn’t come too much of a surprise that Besu has garnered a lot of attention in recent times.

According to Pegasys’ Business Development Lead, Khan,

“A lot of people have built pilots or are in production with Quorum and they are now doing PoCs or tests of Besu so that they can compare them.”

Khan went on to expound upon another reason why Besu is preferred and it is supposedly its compatibility with the ethereum chain:

“Our Holy Grail is finding secure, scalable ways for enterprise to connect to mainnet, either running their own nodes or running private consortiums with some kind of bridge.”

An example in which two versions of the Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance (IBFT) was given to show the difference between Besu and Quorum. As per the claims made, Besu’s version called IBFT2, is thought of by Munnings as being more stable.

However, he went on to share that,

“unfortunately [IBFT2] is not compatible at the moment with the Quorum implementation but we are hoping that they will sort that out between them.”

What the Competition is Like as Per Hyperledger

Speaking regarding the competition that exists between his platform and that of JP Morgan’s is Executive Director of Hyperledger, Brian Behlendorf. He specifically shared that competition is typically different when it comes to open source projects and proprietary platforms. That said, he believes that “Quorum’s works will naturally flow into Besu,” writes CoinDesk.

Behlendorf was also referenced stating:

“I think for any open-source project to mature and actually become an industry movement, it does need multiple companies providing support and eventually things like administrator certification or being able to certify vendors. Those are two things we have now jumped into at Hyperledger.”

Interestingly, Behlendorf went on to share that the possibility of pitching to Quorum is there, since he thinks that “they may have challenges with going forward.”