ConsenSys Quorum 21.1.0 Features Enhanced Ethereum Mainnet Compatibility
ConsenSys Quorum 21.1.0 is now generally available! The ConsenSys Quorum team has been hard at work developing on the platform over the last few months and we are pleased to share the latest developments. Improvements in the 21.1.0 release include progress towards mainnet and infrastructure reduction costs as well as cross compatibility between Hyperledger Besu and GoQuorum. The ConsenSys Quorum 21.1.0 release features significant advancements in Ethereum Mainnet development. The enhancements, based on customer feedback, demonstrate ConsenSys’ focus on making projects easier to run in production.
GoQuorum is the permissioned Enterprise Ethereum client ConsenSys acquired from JP Morgan in August 2020. The team has been focusing on the continued compatibility between Hyperledger Besu and GoQuorum. Included in this release are two features that already were included in Hyperledger Besu and now also are embedded in GoQuorum.
Hyperledger Besu is an Ethereum client designed to be enterprise-friendly for both public and private permissioned network use cases. It can also be run on test networks such as Rinkeby, Ropsten, and Görli. Hyperledger Besu is interoperable with any private Ethereum network and also with the Ethereum Mainnet.
Mainnet Improvements for Network Upgrades, Database and Storage
As a mainnet compatible Enterprise Ethereum client, Hyperledger Besu has several advancements included in 21.1.2 Release. The new enhancements include:
Berlin Network Upgrade
Our ConsenSys Quorum team has been preparing Hyperledger Besu to be compatible with the next Ethereum hard fork, Berlin. The Berlin Network upgrade will include several improvements to the Ethereum mainnet, such as the addition of subroutines to the EVM, the introduction of “transaction envelopes”; which make it easier for Ethereum to support several different kinds of transactions, and changes in gas costs to increase the security of the network.
Important note: the 21.1.0 release contains an outdated version of the Berlin network upgrade. If you are using Besu on public Ethereum networks, you must upgrade to 21.1.2
Mainnet Launcher
The ConsenSys Quorum team’s goal is always to make our products easier to use. We built the Mainnet Launcher feature specifically with this goal in mind. Mainnet Launcher makes it easy to create a config file for an Ethereum client at startup, even if you have no idea what a config file is! The Launcher asks you questions via the command line about what features you want enabled on your Besu node, and then starts Besu with the appropriate configurations. To see a 30 second demo of the Mainnet Launcher click here.
Bonsai Tries – Early Access
Bonsai Tries is a new database format which reduces storage requirements and improves performance for access to recent state. While this feature is being developed as a way to deal with mainnet’s large state size, any network with a comparable state could benefit from it. With Bonsai Tries instead of a multi-trie key value store, there is one trie, one set of indexed leafs, and a series of diffs that can be used to move the trie forward or backwards. This will reduce chain head count and state read and write amplification from its current 10x-20x levels to 1x-2x for non-committed access. Note: only full sync is currently supported.
Improvements to Reduce Infrastructure Costs
Node Hibernation
In large networks it is likely that some nodes do not receive or initiate transactions for extended periods of time. These nodes incur a potentially unwanted infrastructure cost. Node Hibernation provides a solution to this problem by monitoring a node’s API traffic and stopping (hibernating) the node if it has not had any API activity for a significant period of time.
Multi-Tenancy
A “Multi-tenant environment” allows a number of users to use the same Ethereum node to connect to the network. This is beneficial to network operators because it significantly reduces infrastructure costs. In GoQuorum, multi-tenancy allows multiple participants to use the same GoQuorum and Tessera node. Each participant is a tenant and the operator is the owner of the GoQuorum and Tessera node.
What’s Next for ConsenSys Quorum?
Stay tuned for more information on the latest developments of ConsenSys Quorum. For more information on the new release of ConsenSys Quorum, or to if you would like to contribute or need technical support, check these resources:
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Check out our newest GitHub repository, Quorum Awesome.
Quorum Awesome is a curated list of awesome softwares, libraries, tools, articles, educational resources, discussion channels and more to build on ConsenSys Quorum.
