// the find
Consensys/quorum
A permissioned implementation of Ethereum supporting data privacy
GoQuorum is a permissioned Ethereum fork from ConsenSys (originally J.P. Morgan) that adds private transactions, consortium-friendly consensus algorithms (IBFT, QBFT, Raft), and peer permissioning on top of go-ethereum. It was the dominant enterprise Ethereum client for several years, used in production by banks and financial consortia. It is now archived and unmaintained.
The private transaction model via Tessera is well-designed — public state and private state are separated at the protocol level, not bolted on. QBFT consensus gives real finality without mining, which matters for settlement use cases. The pluggable account architecture (via clef extensions) means you can wire in HSMs or external vaults without forking. The codebase tracks go-ethereum releases closely enough that Ethereum tooling mostly just works.
The repo is officially archived — ConsenSys explicitly says do not use this for new projects. The successor is Hyperledger Besu, which supports the same QBFT consensus and private transactions via Tessera, but is actively maintained. Tessera is a required sidecar for any private transaction use, adding operational complexity and a second failure point. The Raft consensus option is fast but non-BFT, meaning a single node crash can halt block production — a bad tradeoff for anything serious.