The American multinational giant bank JPMorgan Chase & Co has entered into a strategic partnership with the blockchain-based company ConsenSys. As part of the deal, ConsenSys will acquire the bank’s enterprise blockchain platform – Quorum.
As reported earlier by Reuters, the New York-based blockchain startup has acquired Quorum and plans to merge the enterprise protocol engineering roadmaps and technology.
Although neither party has disclosed the financial terms of the deal, ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin confirmed that “we have acquired the Quorum IP, JPMorgan has made a strategic investment, and there is a commercial arrangement to continue to support JPMorgan in their projects.”
Despite the acquisition, the Quorum team will remain at JPM and assist with the transition over the next year, explained Umar Farooq, global head of blockchain at the bank. He added that the team will resume working on other DLT projects only after the transition is completed.
Farooq asserted that “a platform like Quorum could thrive better in the hands of software and services-oriented organization,” such as ConsenSys.
JPMorgan’s blockchain department built the Quorum project internally by employing the Ethereum network. Currently, the bank utilizes the platform to run the Interbank Information Network – a payment system that includes more than 300 banks. JPMorgan reassured that even after the transition, Quorum will continue operating the network and other bank projects.
According to Reuters, the two organizations have been negotiating a deal since February this year.
ConsenSys revealed further details regarding the deal and the potential effects in an official statement. It described the ConsenSys Quorum platform as “an open-source protocol layer that serves as a foundation for businesses to build public or private Ethereum-based enterprise solutions.”
The company added that the platform is “made up of four layers of open-source codebase: client software, private transaction management, external transaction signing, and additional tooling.”
Developers and businesses can also deploy a variety of institutional-grade product features provided by ConsenSys to enable payments, document management, workflow optimization, risk compliance, and tokenization.
Upon completing the transition, the company plans to expand its enterprise Ethereum offerings by three additional features. Those are robust production-grade services on top of the open-source codebases, enhanced development processes for both private and public enterprise solutions, and “commitment to open-source development.”
ConsenSys referred to the acquisition as “an important step in the ecosystem’s commitment to enterprise adoption and development.”
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