Quorum and Constellation
Two projects I’ve been working on for the past year:
Quorum, written in Go, is a fork of Ethereum (geth) developed in partnership with Ethlab (Jeff Wilcke, Bas van Kervel, et al) with some major changes:
Transactions can be marked private. Private transactions go on the same public blockchain, but contain nothing but a SHA-3-512 digest of encrypted payloads that were exchanged between the relevant peers. Only the peers who have and can decrypt that payload will execute the real contracts of the transaction, while others will ignore it. This achieves the interesting property that transaction contents are still sealed in the blockchain’s history, but are known only to the relevant peers.
Because not every peer executes every private transaction, a separate, private state Patricia Merkle trie was added. Mutations caused by private transactions affect the state in the private trie, while public transactions affect the public trie. The public state continues to be validated as expected, but the private state has no validation. (In the future, we’d like to have the peers verify shared private contract states.)
Two new consensus algorithms were added to supplant Proof-of-Work (PoW): QuorumChain, developed by Ethlab: a customizable, smart contract-based voting mechanism; as well as a Raft-based consensus mechanism, developed by Brian Schroeder and Joel Burget, which is based on the Raft implementation in etcd. (Neither of these are hardened/byzantine fault tolerant, but we hope to add a BFT alternative soon.)
Peering and synchronization between nodes can be restricted to a known list of peers.
Constellation, written in Haskell, is a daemon which implements a simple peer-to-peer network. Nodes on the network are each the authoritative destination for some number of public keys.
When users of another node’s API request to send a payload (raw bytestring) to some of the public keys known to the network, the node will:
- Encrypt the payload in a manner similar to PGP, but using NaCl’s
secretbox/authenticated encryption - Encrypt the MK for the secretbox for each recipient public key using
box - Transmit the ciphertext to the receiving node(s)
- Return the 512-bit SHA3 digest of that ciphertext
In the case of Quorum, the payload is the original transaction bytecode, and the digest, which becomes the contents of the transaction that goes on the public chain, represents its ciphertext.
A succinct description of Constellation might be “a network of nodes that individually are MTAs, and together form a keyserver; the network allows you to send an ‘NaCl-PGP’-encrypted envelope to anyone listed in the keyserver’s list of public keys.”
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Cakeshop, an IDE for Ethereum and Quorum developed by Chetan Sarva and Felix Shnir:
Cakeshop is a set of tools and APIs for working with Ethereum-like ledgers, packaged as a Java web application archive (WAR) that gets you up and running in under 60 seconds.
Included in the package is the geth Ethereum server, a Solidity compiler and all dependencies.
It provides tools for managing a local blockchain node, setting up clusters, exploring the state of the chain, and working with contracts.
If you’re interested in being a part of these projects, please jump in!