Starting in October 21 2021, Consensys will offer Quorum Subscription with Allfunds Privacy, a new commercial offering that will allow enterprises to leverage innovative privacy features that have been developed for the Allfunds Blockchain platform.
Quorum Subscription with Allfunds Privacy is a new commercial private transaction management solution that expands the permissioning and privacy features of the Quorum suite, and provides a new privacy model. It is based on patented technology created by Allfunds Blockchain, that will now be maintained and commercially supported by Consensys.
“We are very proud about this new milestone. The most important thing in a blockchain initiative is clearly the technology, and having a leading firm as Consensys commercializing our technology beyond the Fund Industry is the best example to demonstrate how robust is our value proposition. Helping to solve the main data governance challenge in blockchain networks with this new privacy approach, contributes without doubt to the continued development of the Enterprise Ethereum ecosystem.” Ruben Nieto, Managing Director of Allfunds Blockchain.
This launch opens the possibility to apply the privacy enhancements beyond the original Allfunds Blockchain Fund Industry use case. Selected consulting firms, as well as technology and blockchain companies have been testing alpha versions of the solution to understand the possibilities that this new privacy approach has opened in the continued development of the Enterprise Ethereum ecosystem.
The latest partnership between Quorum Subscription and Allfunds Privacy comes as part of an ongoing relationship between Allfunds and Consensys. The two companies had announced in February 2021 a partnership to combine Consensys Quorum with the power of the Allfunds Funds Industry Platform in order to radically streamline the global fund distribution industry by enabling instant, reliable, secure communication among industry actors.
Quorum Subscription with Allfunds Privacy is offered as licensed software that can be deployed by customers on-premise or in the customers' cloud environments, supported by Consensys.
What are the key features of Allfunds Privacy?
The key features of Allfunds Privacy are as follows:
● On-chain, encrypted storage of private transactions: When using the Allfunds Privacy transaction flow, a private transaction is fully encrypted and saved on-chain, rather than being communicated through peer-to-peer messages. This means that in case of audit or catastrophic loss of data by a transaction participant, the transaction details can be retrieved directly from the immutable blockchain ledger.
● Anonymity: Any actor on the network who is not party to the private transaction cannot receive information about private transaction senders and recipients from on-chain data. This is consistent with the overall privacy approach of Hyperledger Besu.
● Pre-defined validation flow of private transactions: When using the Allfunds Privacy private transaction flow, a validator node configured in the consensus algorithm can read and validate every private transaction . This means that private transaction validation can be enforced and distributed by a predefined set of validators nodes, rather than being left to peer-to-peer validation of private transaction participants.
Private transaction validation and distribution is not subject to the availability of private transaction participants. This is especially useful in business contexts where designated regulated operators are accountable for the confirmation of confidential transactions.
● Based on Hyperledger Besu: Currently, Allfunds Privacy is available for users of the Hyperledger Besu implementation of Consensys Quorum. Compatibility with the GoQuorum Ethereum client may be offered at a later stage.
"Our partnership with Allfunds will further facilitate global blockchain adoption for the fund's industry and enrich the ecosystem with technical innovations suitable for advanced privacy use cases. Privacy is a core element of the Consensys Quorum stack and collaborating with industry stakeholders will help produce the most sophisticated blockchain architecture for our partners." Madeline Murray, Product Lead of Consensys Quorum
How is Allfunds Privacy implemented in the blockchain network?
A Quorum blockchain network with Allfunds Privacy involves the following set of blockchain nodes:
● Allfunds Privacy validator node: The validator nodes are pre-defined by the governance of the platform and are responsible for the validation of public and private transactions (optionally). They can have read-access to all or a subset of the private transactions, and can ensure that valid transactions are validated even if private transaction participants are not available. In a regulated context, they can assume accountability for the establishment of a single source of truth among private transaction participants.
● Allfunds Privacy regular node: The regular nodes are all the other nodes in the network enabled by Allfunds Privacy. They are able to submit and read private transactions in which they participate. Each regular node stores public/private encryption keys that enable it to read the on-chain payload of encrypted private transactions in which it participates that are emitted by other members, or to encrypt the transactions that it should emit to the network.
A Quorum blockchain network with Allfunds Privacy can have a different network topology than a Quorum blockchain network that uses Tessera for privacy. A key difference between the two is the role of validator nodes in enforcing both permissioning, and validation of private transactions to reduce the number of peer interconnections.
How is Quorum Subscription with Allfunds Privacy offered to prospective customers?
Quorum Subscription with Allfunds Privacy is offered as an add-on to customers of Quorum Subscription.
It is provided as licensed software images, to be deployed by customers on-premise or in their cloud environment.
Quorum Subscription with Allfunds Privacy offers the same service level options as Quorum Subscription plans, such as:
● Bronze plan: 1 business day response time for day-to-day operational errors, 2 business day response time for questions and requests.
● Silver plan (for production only): 4 business hours response time if core processing capability is limited, 1 business day response time for day-to-day operational errors, 2 business day response time for questions and requests.
● Gold plan (for production only): 1 business hour response time if core processing capability is inaccessible, 4 business hours response time if core processing capability is limited, 1 business day response time for day-to-day operational errors, 2 business day response time for questions and requests.
● Enterprise plan (for production only): to be quoted upon request.
Learn more about AllFunds x Consensys Partnership
About Consensys Quorum
Consensys Quorum enables enterprises to leverage Ethereum for their high-value blockchain applications. Businesses can rely on the Quorum open-source protocol layer and integrate it with modules from Consensys and other companies, or custom platforms in order to build high-performance decentralized applications.
The Consensys Quorum suite is a modular collection of enterprise-grade technologies that includes open-source components such as the GoQuorum and Hyperledger Besu Ethereum clients and the Tessera private transaction manager, as well commercially available components such as Quorum Subscription.
According to Consensys estimates, Consensys Quorum is currently used in production by more than 100 blockchain projects around the world.
Contact details
If you are already an Allfunds customer, please contact Allfunds directly.
Otherwise, please visit https://allfunds.dev/en/consensys/ for more information.