Our team is pleased to announce that Consensys Quorum 21.7.0  is available today for download. Consensys Quorum is the leading open source Enterprise Ethereum offering. You can run permissioned networks as well as Ethereum mainnet nodes using Consensys Quorum. Our team’s recent updates include enhancements to both Consensys Quorum’s mainnet and permissioned network usage in addition to interoperability between the two Ethereum clients, Hyperledger Besu and GoQuorum.

Mainnet Enhancements

The Consensys Quorum team continues to focus on ensuring Hyperledger Besu is a leading mainnet Ethereum client. This release includes some exciting changes to Ethereum as well as the Hyperledger Besu client.

London Hard Fork

Consensys Quorum is ready for the London Hard Fork, which is scheduled to go live on Ethereum Mainnet on August 4th. The London Hard Fork includes several advancements to the Ethereum protocol including, EIP-1559. EIP-1559 is the highly anticipated Ethereum Improvement Proposal, which changes Ethereum’s fee market mechanism by removing first-price auction as the main gas fee calculation. With the changes in EIP-1559, there will now be a base fee for Ethereum transactions and users can decide to add a tip to its transaction to incentivize miners to prioritize their transaction. Hyperledger Besu, the mainnet compatible Ethereum client included in Consensys Quorum, has been preparing for this Fork and is ready to implement this change.

EthStats Support

Previously, we launched EthStats support as an experimental feature. We are pleased to share that it is now a stable feature generally available for use within Hyperledger Besu. EthStats provides insight into network health by displaying real time and historical statistics about the network and nodes on public mainnets, testnets and permissioned networks.

Permissioned Network Enhancements

Consensys Quorum team has continued its efforts towards interoperability between the two Ethereum clients, GoQuorum and Hyperledger Besu. Our continued progress demonstrates our team’s commitment to empowering users with the best features to deliver their use cases. We have added two new features in the 21.7.0 Release that enable our users in private networks.

QBFT: The New Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus Algorithm

The team has released QBFT, a Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus algorithm, building on the capabilities of IBFT and IBFT 2.0. In addition to the benefits of earlier BFT consensus mechanisms, such as stability and reliability, QBFT aims to provide performance improvements in cases of excess round change. QBFT is interoperable between GoQuorum and Hyperledger Besu and supports networks with both GoQuorum and Hyperledger Besu nodes.

Because QBFT is an early access feature, we currently recommend it for new networks. Existing networks using IBFT2.0 cannot currently migrate to QBFT. This will become available in a future release. The Consensys Quorum team would also welcome any community feedback on the feature and their experience using it in their networks.

Privacy with Tessera

As we announced in May, we are excited to share that Tessera, the private transaction manager, is now compatible with the complete Consensys Quorum suite including Hyperledger Besu. The 21.7.0 Release adds the full Tessera upgrade into Hyperledger Besu, enabling the following capabilities: 

  • Tessera supports a new GoQuorum-compatible privacy mode in early access.

  • Tessera works with Hashicorp, AWS and Azure Key vaults for private key storage.

  • Tessera can be used with InfluxDB and Prometheus for metrics. This means you can use Grafana or your own custom dashboards.

  • Tessera logs can be searched, analyzed and monitored using Splunk. Splunk can be set up in such a way that the logs for multiple Tessera nodes in a network are accessible from a single Splunk instance.

Tooling Enhancements

Consensys Quorum team has dedicated effort into improving tooling to keep facilitating the integration of Quorum in your platforms.

Web3js-Quorum

The team has released web3js-quorum, a new JavaScript web3 library allowing developers to easily interface with a Consensys Quorum node. It’s compatible with both Besu and GoQuorum. In particular, it allows users to send private transactions and manage consensus.

What’s Next for Consensys Quorum?

Stay tuned for more information on the latest developments of Consensys Quorum. For more information on our releases or to engage with our developers:

This guide to Quorum Awesome describes all of the components in Consensys Quorum and when to use each of them.