Performance Evaluation of the Quorum Blockchain Platform

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of Quorum, a permissioned blockchain platform based on Ethereum, focusing on throughput, latency, and the impact of various parameters under different workloads and consensus algorithms.

Contribution

It provides a detailed characterization of Quorum's performance features, including how transaction parameters influence latency and throughput.

Findings

Quorum supports multiple consensus algorithms with varying performance.

Transaction parameters significantly affect latency and throughput.

Performance varies with workload types and consensus choices.

Abstract

Quorum is a permissioned blockchain platform built from the Ethereum codebase with adaptations to make it a permissioned consortium platform. It is one of the key contenders in the permissioned ledger space. Quorum supports confidentiality and privacy of smart contracts and transactions, and crash and Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithms. In this paper, we characterize the performance features of Quorum. We study the throughput and latency characteristics of Quorum with different workloads and consensus algorithms that it supports. Through a suite of micro-benchmarks, we explore how certain transaction and smart contract parameters can affect transaction latencies.