
JPMorgan in talks to merge blockchain unit Quorum with startup ConsenSys - pbhowmic
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jp-morgan-blockchain-exclusive/exclusive-jpmorgan-in-talks-to-merge-blockchain-unit-quorum-with-startup-consensys-sources-idUSKBN2051AW
======
throw39820984
I was at Consensys briefly in 2017. From my perspective (inside the venture
half), it was more of a playground than a workplace. I was vaguely aware of
the "consulting" half, and that they were working with banks who wanted into
crypto at this period of peak hype.

There were some incredibly smart people working on interesting problems, but a
significant portion of the people working there seemed (to me) detached from
reality – solving problems of their own creation. That's not necessarily a bad
thing, the let a thousand flowers bloom approach, but it doesn't strike me as
something that JP Morgan would touch? It must have sobered up since 2017.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
_“but a significant portion of the people working there seemed (to me)
detached from reality – solving problems of their own creation.“_

This describes blockchain work in general. It has always been a clumsy
solution looking for a problem.

~~~
arxpoetica
Rather, a problem so broad (don't tell me there's not a money problem), that
tackling it will take a lot longer than people anticipate.

------
carterschonwald
This communication doesn’t cite a source. Or an official press release. It’s a
huge no no to publicly release private business information when employed at a
bank.

I just slowly work on puzzling out how to build a nice federated known
participant replicated db with a pleasant service discovery / pki and sane
interpreter/programming language on top by day (with some bits and pieces
ossed when stable over time , with the occasional wee tech talk at workshops
etc), and too much oss Haskell maintainership on my weekends and evenings when
I’m not fried :)

~~~
tempsy
leaks are frowned upon by literally every organization

~~~
carterschonwald
When it involves banking it’s worse. Cause financial laws. And regulators.

Anyways I should get back to building genuinely nice replicated dbs with
normal / actually good db perf and nice programming tools. This whole
blockchain nonsense is kinda like the first data science fad wave. Educating
folks about a set of vocabulary they didn’t realize they lacked before. In
this case how to do nice transactional effect deterministic composable
programming with first class identity, ownership and authorization. Juggling
how to attack closed membership federated generalized paxos and nicely
marrying linear logic with Dependent types for the internal rep plus how to do
humane pki is a lot ;)

------
rasengan
Fred Wilson said it was the end of a 2 year crypto winter [1] and I tend to
agree. With JPMorgan merging Quorum and ConsenSys, and Google announcing
support for Hashgraph [2], I'm optimistic about the widespread adoption of
distributed, decentralized ledger consensus technologies.

[1] [https://avc.com/2020/02/usdc/](https://avc.com/2020/02/usdc/)

[2] [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/working-with-
hede...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/working-with-hedera-
hashgraph-to-support-the-next-generation-of-distributed-ledger-technology)

~~~
anongraddebt
Not sure what to make of Wilson's post, but I can say that the Hedera news is
much ado about nothing.

Hedera raised $100M from investors in 2018. They are now down to $30M in the
bank and the market value of their HBAR token continues its push towards zero.

Google has agreed to be a member of the Hedera council, that is true. However,
all that this amounts to is:

"...Google Cloud will operate a Hedera network node, and make the ledger data
available for analytics alongside GCP's other public DLT datasets..."

So, GCP spun up a single server and will also now allow you to compare data
between the Hedera network and 8 other blockchain networks (I went and counted
the ones that GCP said they provide datasets for).

If I was a high schooler, then it might be kind of neat that I spun up a
server and hosted datasets for 9 different networks. Seems a bit different if
I do that while being the world's 3rd largest player in the cloud-computing
market.

~~~
peakay
seems like their coin got pumped by this news,

[https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/hedera-
hashgraph/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/hedera-hashgraph/)

interesting marketing move?

