Former Chief Engineer of JPMorgan Chase Blockchain Project Juno: Nothing on Ethereum can scale.

Will Martino, the former chief engineer of Juno, JPMorgan Chase’s first blockchain project, shared with Cointelegraph his views on Consensys’ acquisition of JPMorgan Chase’s blockchain platform Quorum. He argues that while the technology was great for its time, it has inherited fundamental flaws from Ethereum (ETH). After leaving JPMorgan, he founded Kadena, a proof-of-work blockchain that uses sharding for scalability.

JPMorgan Chase: Ethereum will continue to outperform Bitcoin, but both are overvalued: On November 6, JPMorgan Chase explained the main reasons why Ethereum is superior to Bitcoin in its recent report. Analyst Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou noted that Ethereum is at the forefront of DeFi. According to data provided by DeFiPulse, the total value locked in Ethereum-based DeFi projects has now exceeded $106 billion. Coupled with NFTs and stablecoins, Ethereum has more use cases than its bigger and older competitors.

Panigirtzoglou noted that Bitcoin, as a hedge against inflation, thrives in a low interest rate environment that exposes the financial system to risks. However, bitcoin and gold could take a hit as bond yields rise. According to Panigirtzoglou, ether is also less susceptible to environmental issues due to its imminent transition to proof-of-stake (PoS).

But JPMorgan believes both major cryptocurrencies are trading above their fair valuations. (U. Today) [2021/11/7 6:36:19]

While there are few details about ConsenSys' recent acquisition of Quorum, it's important to note that JPMorgan Chase was investing in ConsenSys at the same time as it spun off Quorum. Martino believes that JPMorgan's investment is above the price of Quorum. For JPMorgan, he argues, this could be an easy way out of a dead-end business unit:

JPMorgan Sends Bitcoin-Related Educational Material to Clients: JPMorgan Chase has distributed an educational material to its clients to help them understand the basics, risks and potential of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Content includes the basics of Bitcoin and the implications of adding Bitcoin to your investment portfolio. (The Block) [2021/3/5 18:19:34]

"Quorum is a real attempt to get Ethereum technology to take hold in an industrial setting. But it's being repurposed, and I don't really think Consensys will make much headway. In my opinion, I think they're mostly In buying the brand, from that perspective, they can only use the Quorum trademark and intellectual property for marketing.”

Tokensoft plans to introduce WBTC and WETH into JPMorgan Chase's Kadena network: On February 24th, the security token platform Tokensoft announced that it will introduce its Bitcoin and Ethereum anchor coins, namely WBTC and WETH, into Kadena, a blockchain company under JPMorgan Chase network. The initiative aims to advance the use case of Kadena's multi-protocol decentralized exchange, KadenaSwap. (CoinDesk) [2021/2/24 17:49:31]

The real problem with Quorum is that it doesn't scale, Martino said. This might come as a surprise considering it was forked from Ethereum and does not involve mining. However, according to Martino, the problem runs deeper, stemming from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM):

“So, when you use something, like the EVM, it’s never been a bottleneck on a public blockchain, and then you put it on a private blockchain, all of a sudden, it can easily become a bottleneck. That’s how Quorum is at every second One of the reasons why I had a lot of trouble executing more than 200,000 trades."

Martino said his skepticism about ethereum and its derivative technologies comes from personal experience and talking to many people in the enterprise space who have tried ethereum:

"If JP Morgan, one of the biggest companies ever, can't drive adoption, even though they have great internal use cases, you have to ask yourself 'why'? And my answer to that is that Ethereum technology is fundamentally driven by limited. And if you go and talk to other big systems integrators, big consulting firms, you'll hear very, very similar things. As long as the company's head of blockchain isn't someone who holds a lot of Ethereum tokens, you You’ll find people saying: ‘We tried Ethereum, it just didn’t work’.”

It’s unclear whether JPMorgan has lost interest in blockchain technology as a whole, or just this particular internal experiment. Martino doesn't think banks will switch to Hyperledger's Fabric, a popular solution for enterprise companies. In his opinion, it's even worse than Quorum, which he called at one point "best in class." In addition to Kadena, Martino said Near is also a viable option. But he believes the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed enterprise blockchain adoption. We probably won't see another major push until 2021-2022, he noted.

Tags：

UNI