Constellation could be considered a P2P system in which each node in the system can act as a distributed key server and mail transfer agent (MTA), using PGP encryption to encrypt messages. It is this part of Quorum that allows for transactions to be made private, and is composed of two parts: the Transaction Manager and Enclave.

The Transaction Manager handles transaction privacy by storing and making transaction data available, as well as exchanging transaction payloads with Transaction Manager instances on other nodes. It does not have access to any of the private keys required for encryption, which is the job of the Enclave. The Enclave's job is to handle both key-generation and the encryption of transaction data. As its name suggests, handling these jobs separately allows sensitive operations to be isolated.