Leader and Lead Developer Quit JPMorgan’s Blockchain Project “Juno”
JPMorgan has lost two of its senior leaders on its blockchain project, Juno, as they embark on starting up their own blockchain startup, a report by Quartz revealed.
Will Martino, the lead developer and Stuart Popejoy, the head of Juno started Kadena.io in June; however, the two departures signify the difficult task that financial institutions have at retaining tech talent as they embrace the blockchain technology.
By utilizing the Juno project, Martino and Popejoy are hoping with their own blockchain startup to highlight the risk that companies will be taking by following the open source route. According to a white paper, Kadena intends to let its users on the blockchain conduct business with each other privately.
However, despite the departures of the two senior leaders, JPMorgan is still dedicated to the blockchain technology and how it can further improve services within the banking sector. JPMorgan is undertaking trials for its own version of a blockchain as the bank employs its Juno blockchain project to determine payments between London and Toyko with 2,200 clients.
Juno?
Earlier this year, JPMorgan unveiled its Juno blockchain project at the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project. The aim of the project is to explore the development of an open source blockchain, and is available on the Github repository .
Juno provides support for a smart contract using a ‘Hopper’ language, with the inspiration of Juno originating from the Tangaroa algorithm, which in turn is based on the Raft algorithm, which offers better scalability over proof-of-work mining.
However, the consensus with the Juno platform is reached by an election-type system whereby a leader ensures that an agreement can be reached by the followers. As Juno only requires a consensus on inputs and not outputs, nodes that are slow are less likely to slow the whole system down.
There is big debate surrounding the blockchain capacity within Bitcoin and the issue of scalability. However, at the unveiling of Juno earlier this year, an un-optimized Juno instance running four nodes on a MacBook Pro managed throughput consensus of 500 per second and 2ms latency of consensus. Considering Bitcoin can presently manage seven transactions per second compared to Visa at 2,000 transactions per second, this is positive news.
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