Quorum

Quorum is a decentralized platform that allows us to build permissioned blockchain-based DApps on top of it. Actually, Quorum is a fork of Ethereum (actually Quorum is a fork of Go Ethereum, which is an implementation of Ethereum using Golang), therefore if you have ever worked on Ethereum then you will find it easy to learn and build permissioned blockchains using Quorum. Many enterprises select Quorum for building blockchains because of Ethereum's large community, which makes it easy to find Ethereum developers. What makes Quorum different from Ethereum is that it supports privacy (it lets parties do transactions privately); peer whitelisting, so you can mention a list of other nodes that are allowed to connect to your node (in Ethereum this needs to be done at network level); many different flavors of consensus protocols suitable for permissioned blockchain, and provides very high performance. 

Quorum currently supports three consensus protocols, QuorumChain, IBFT, and Raft. We will skip QuorumChain in this book, as Raft and IBFT fulfil all our requirements.

Microsoft Azure provides BaaS to easily build your own Quorum network on the Cloud. But, in this book, we will learn how to install it manually, and we won't be using BaaS.