Hedera
Hashgraph
Introduction
Hedera is a public distributed ledger network for building and deploying decentralized applications and microservices running at web scale. It goes beyond blockchain to provide the fast, fair, and secure environment needed to enable enterprise adoption of distributed ledger technologies.Hashgraph is Hedera's innovative distributed consensus algorithm and data structure capable of providing high throughput, fair ordering, and low-latency consensus finality in seconds, without relying on a centralized infrastructure.
HBAR is Hedera's native, energy-efficient cryptocurrency token used to transfer value and pay for services on the Hedera network.
Website Papers Ecosystem
Hedera Hashgraph
- Public
- Permissioned, but on a path to permissionless
- Leaderless PoS (Proof of Stake)
- aBFT (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant)
- Not a Blockchain (more advanced)
- DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph)
- Open Source 100%
- Carbon Negative
- Limited to 10,000+ TPS (transactions per second) on mainnet
- 250,000+ TPS on testnet, across one continent - unsharded
- 500,000+ TPS on testnet, across one geographic region - unsharded
- 1,000,000 signatures per second on testnet when using the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
- Low-latency (3-5 seconds transaction finality)
- Predictible low-fees ($0.0001)
- Fixed Supply (50 billion HBAR)
- Native Staking (24-hour rewards, no bonding or slashing)
- No Blocks
- No Miners
- No Mempool
- No MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) risk
- No Forks
- No Freeze / Inflate / Burn option (HBAR)
- Immutable / Multi-signature / Scheduled Transactions
- DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack-resilient
- Sybil attack-resistant
- NIST (US National Institute of Standards and Technology) compliant
- SHA-3 384 bit, RSA 3072 bit, AES-GCM 256 bit, ECDH 384 bit, ECDSA (secp256k1) 384 bit, EdDSA (ed25519) 256 bit
- CNSA (Commercial National Security Algorithm) compliant - US Top Secret information standard
- TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.2 encrypted
- Firewall Piercing support
- IPv4 / IPv6 support
- ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) compliant
- GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant
- ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) compliant
- GS1 AI 8112 compliant
- EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible
- Solidity / Vyper smart contracts
- ERC-20 (Fungible) / ERC-721 (Non-Fungible) / ERC-1155 (Multi-Token) compatible
- JavaScript / Java / Go / Swift / C / Python / Rust / .NET SDKs (Software Development Kit)
- DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers)
- VCs (Verified Credentials)
- Custom Token Fees - fixed, fractional, royalty
- NFT Royalties built in at the token level - executed by the network
- Atomic Swaps
- Soulbound Tokens
- Token-level KYC (Know Your Customer) - optional
- Peer Reviewed
- Coq Proof Confirmed
- Post-Quantum secure
- W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) member
- WEF (World Economic Forum) partner
Founders
Dr. Leemon Baird has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from US Air Force Academy and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, where he set the record for the history of the school in getting his PhD in the shortest amount of time possible, 2 years and 9 months.Dr. Leemon Baird is the inventor of the Hashgraph distributed consensus algorithm, and the Co-founder and CTO of Swirlds Inc. With over 20 years of technology and startup experience, he has held positions as a Professor of Computer Science at US Air Force Academy and as a senior scientist in several labs. He has been the co-founder of several startups, including two identity-related starts ups, which were acquired. He has multiple patents and publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences in computer security, machine learning, and mathematics.
Mance Harmon has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Mississippi State University, and a master's degree in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he focused on Machine / Artificial Intelligence and optimization algorithms for process control.
Mance Harmon is an experienced technology executive and entrepreneur with more than 20 years of strategic leadership experience in multi-national corporations, government agencies and high-tech startups, and the Co-founder and CEO of Swirlds Inc. Prior experience includes serving as the Head of Architecture and Labs at Ping Identity, Founder / CEO of two tech startups, the senior executive for product security at a $1.7B revenue organization, Program Manager for a very-large scale software program for the Missile Defense Agency, the Course Director for Cybersecurity at US Air Force Academy, and research scientist in Machine Learning at Wright Laboratory.
"Our goal is to build a ledger that will be around for 100+ years. We want Hashgraph to become the infrastructure of the entire planet, for generations to come. The Trust Layer of The Internet."
"I personally believe that Dr. Leemon Baird solved the problem of distributed consensus. You cannot do better than aBFT (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant) and the bandwidth limit of transactions with 2 hashes." - Mance Harmon
"If you look at the algorithm in the math, Hashgraph should run right at the limits of what the laws of mathematics allow, to what the speed of the internet itself allows." - Dr. Leemon Baird
Vision
2012 ... 2014Dr. Leemon Baird begins to work on solving how to achieve distributed consensus at scale.
2015 ... 2016
Dr. Leemon Baird develops the breakthrough innovation now called Hashgraph.
Dr. Leemon Baird explains his vision for Hashgraph (2018)
Tokenomics
Hedera has a maximum supply of 50 billion HBAR tokens, all minted at mainnet launch, on Aug 24, 2018. Treasury Management ReportHedera's plan, right from the get-go, was to slowly distribute the entire supply of HBAR over a long period of time (15 years) instead of distributing it all at once, at inception, like most projects do.
The slow distribution of tokens makes a mountain of sense because it prevents whales from buying/owning a large percentage of the supply at, or (immediately) after, network launch, when the token price is, theoretically, at its lowest.
This preventive tokenomics is brilliant because it dilutes the network's exposure to maleficent actions that might be perpetrated by whales - the bigger the whale, the bigger the risks.
The optimal, most sustainable and secure way to decentralize a public distributed network is to slowly distribute its entire fixed supply of tokens over time, like Hedera does - this should really be crypto-industry standard tokenomics, but most projects lack this long-term vision.
Consensus
The goal of a distributed consensus algorithm is to allow a group of computers to come to an agreement on the order in which some of the computers generated transactions, when no single computer is trusted by everyone. SourceDr. Leemon Baird explains how the Hashgraph consensus works, in less than 5 minutes (2018)
Dr. Leemon Baird explains in detail how the Hashgraph consensus works, using pictures (2017)
Hashgraph's innovative Gossip About Gossip protocol (source) and Virtual Voting (source) made it possible for Hashgraph to have the best-in-class leaderless consensus algorithm.
Dr. Leemon Baird explains the Virtual Voting algorithm (2018)
Related videos : Voting-based Economy-based Leader-based Proof-of-work
Services
Hedera Token ServiceConfigure, mint, and manage fungible and non-fungible tokens on Hedera for application payments, governance, or digital collectibles. Source Video
Hedera Consensus Service
Record immutable, verifiable, and fairly ordered event data for any application or permissioned blockchain framework. Track assets on a supply chain, IP rights, or identity credentials. Source
Hedera File Service
Store smart contract byte code, address books, credentials, and other critical files on the Hedera network.
Hedera Smart Contract Service
Deploy smart contracts in popular languages, including Solidity and Vyper, to create decentralized applications and protocols. Source
Capabilities
Multi-Signature Transactions
Execute transactions in real-time when multiple key or threshold key signature requirements are met. Source
Scheduled Transactions
Enable multiple parties to easily, inexpensively, and natively schedule and execute any type of Hedera transaction together. Source
Atomic Swaps
Swap native tokens issued using Hedera Token Service with another (or with HBAR) between two accounts. Source
Token-level KYC
The Hedera Token Service allows issuers to optionally require KYC (Know Your Customer) for any accounts which receive or send their token. The KYC provider can mark an account as KYC'd or not. If KYC is required, the account cannot hold the token until it has been marked as KYC'd. No PII (Personal Identifiable Information) is required to be shared. Source
Soulbound Tokens
Non-transferable non-fungible tokens (NFTs) intended to represent an aspect of someone's identity, skills, or qualifications. Source Video
Custom Token Fees
When you create a token, you have the ability to set one or many custom fees (up to 10). Custom fees are fees that are distributed to the specified accounts each time the token is transferred programmatically. These custom fees can be either a fixed fee, fractional fee, or royalty fee. Source
NFT Royalties
On Hedera, NFT royalties are built in at the token level, without the need for smart contracts. The royalties' distribution is managed and executed perpetually by the network itself, via the Hedera Token Service / Custom Token Fees, every time a transfer of ownership is initiated. This eliminates the risk of NFT royalties being voided by marketplaces. Source
Security
Dr. Leemon Baird explains the security of Hedera Hashgraph (Launch Event NYC, 2018)Hedera Hashgraph is aBFT (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant), the highest level of mathematical security - the Gold Standard - for distributed systems. Article
Hashgraph is the first consensus algorithm to be validated as ABFT by a mathematical proof checked by computer using the Coq system. The verification was conducted at the Carnegie Mellon University.
Coq is a formal proof verification system that provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions and executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs. It is often used for certifying the properties of programs, programming languages, and mathematics. Unlike most mathematical proofs that are merely checked by humans, a Coq proof is actually checked by a computer. This avoids some of the mistakes that humans can make when reading a proof. Source
When it comes to security, which includes using digital signatures and other cryptography to protect communication among network participants, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) sets the standards for all who wish to work with the US government. As a result, any DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) project that wants to be used by the US government - say, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) - or by a company that works with the US government, will have to abide by the NIST security standards. To that end, all the cryptography Hedera uses - SHA-3 384 bit, RSA 3072 bit, AES-GCM 256 bit, ECDH 384 bit, ECDSA (secp256k1) 384 bit, EdDSA (ed25519) 256 bit - complies with NIST standards.
Furthermore, Hedera's core network uses only algorithms from the stricter CNSA (Commercial National Security Algorithm) Suite, which are those NIST standards and parameters deemed suitable by the US government / National Security Agency (NSA) to protect Top Secret information.
All Hedera network communications are encrypted with TLS 1.2 (Transport Layer Security), all transactions are digitally signed, and the Hashgraph is constructed using cryptographic hashes.
Hashgraph is ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) compliant, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) resilient, and Sybil attack-resistant (source).
Hedera is Post-Quantum secure for hashing and encryption, but not for signatures and key agreement. The Hashgraph consensus algorithm itself is post-quantum secure as long as a post-quantum signature is used. The US government does not yet require post-quantum encryption for protecting its own Top Secret information, and are willing to wait a few years for NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology) to finalize the new standard. Hedera Hashgraph is following the same procedure while watching the progress on quantum computation with great interest, ready to implement one of these signature algorithms when the standard is completed. Source
Speed
Dr. Leemon Baird explains the Speed of Hedera Hashgraph (Launch Event NYC, 2018)Hedera is a high-throughput distributed network currently limited to 10,000+ TPS (transactions per second) with low-latency transaction finality in 3-5 seconds. Once consensus is reached, the transaction is immutable and available on the public ledger for everyone to transparently see. In testing, Hashgraph achieved 250,000+ TPS across one continent and 500,000+ TPS accross one geographic region.
Scalability
Hashgraph can operate hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. In testing, 500,000+ TPS were processed, unsharded.Sharding is the separation of nodes into groups. Instead of making all the network nodes see a transaction, sharding only shows that transaction to a group of nodes (one shard), while other groups of nodes (shards) see/process other transactions, in parallel. And this speeds up the ledger, which can now multitask.
Hashgraph is different from most traditional blockchains because it functions as a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), a superior technology where each new transaction requires confirmation from at least two older transactions before being successfully recorded onto the network. This translates into higher speeds (no linear blocks = no bottlenecks), near-zero fees (no miners = no fees), and infinite scalability (2 older transactions required to validate 1 new transaction = the more transactions, the faster the protocol).
Sustainability
UCL (University College London) used a mathematical consumption model, that predicts expected energy consumption per transaction, to compare six major Proof-of-Stake DLTs (Algorand, Cardano, Ethereum 2.0, Hedera, Polkadot, and Tezos). The paper, entitled "Energy Footprint of Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms Beyond Proof-of-Work", concluded that Hedera Hashgraph is the Greenest Proof-of-Stake Network among the analyzed systems. Source Paper
Hedera has adopted the environmental sustainability principle as a core value and is officially committed to carbon negative network operations by purchasing carbon offsets quarterly. Source
Dr. Leemon Baird talks on BBC World News about blockchain/DLT and its impact on the environment (2021)
SIF
In 2022, the HBAR Foundation, which drives the development of the Hedera network by providing grants and resources to developers, launched the Sustainable Impact Fund (SIF), a $100 million fund for sustainable ventures that address the climate crisis challenges of today and tomorrow. SIF aims to invest in Hedera-based solutions that involve carbon emissions, carbon offsets and carbon removals, as well as in other nature-related projects that facilitate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. SourceGuardian
Guardian is an open source tool that leverages the Hedera public distributed ledger network to mint emissions and carbon offset tokens. It provides auditable, traceable, and reproducible records that document the emission process and lifecycle of carbon credits, in order to reduce fraud in the ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) industry. GitHubESG
Our planet requires an ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) public ledger to manage climate assets, liabilities, and verifiable data. Solving the climate issues humankind faces today requires worldwide coordination on a public ledger that is globally available and auditable. Source 1 Source 2In the not so distant future, all companies will be required to report their carbon footprint, while taking into account the carbon usage of the suppliers and vendors that they use to build their products and services. Hedera aligns itself with the ESG standards and is dedicated to safeguard the environment by functioning as a carbon negative network.
Mance Harmon talks about utilizing tokenization to bring accountability and maturity to ESG models (2022)
Dr. Leemon Baird talks about ESG at Upbit Developer Conference (UDC), the largest blockchain conference in Korea (2022)
Transparency
Hedera's network services, officially supported SDKs, the Hashgraph consensus, and every developer tool is fully open source under an Apache 2.0 license. SourceHedera publicly publishes the minutes of each Governing Council meeting, hashed on Hedera using the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS). The Member Agreement signed by the organizations when joininng the Governing Council is also public and hashed. Source
Fairness
Dr. Leemon Baird explains the Fairness of Hedera Hashgraph (Launch Event NYC, 2018)Hashgraph is fair because there is no leader node or miner given special permissions for determining the consensus timestamp assigned to a transaction. Instead, the consensus timestamps for transactions are calculated via an automated voting process in the algorithm through which the nodes collectively and democratically establish the consensus. Source
Fair Access
No individual node can stop a transaction from entering the system, or even delay it very much. If one or a few malicious nodes attempt to prevent a given transaction from being delivered to the rest of the network and so be added into consensus, the random nature of the hashgraph gossip protocol through which nodes communicate messages to each other will ensure that the transaction flows around that blockage.
Fair Timestamps
Hashgraph assigns each transaction a consensus time, which is the median of the times at which each node says it first received it. This is part of the consensus, and so has all the guarantees of being Byzantine. If more than two-thirds of participating nodes are honest and have reliable clocks on their computer, then the timestamp itself will be honest and reliable, because it is generated by an honest and reliable node or falls between two times that were generated by honest and reliable nodes. Even if a few of the clocks are a bit off, or even if a few of the nodes maliciously give times that are far off, the consensus timestamp is not significantly impacted.
Fair Transaction Order
Transactions are put into order according to their timestamps. Because the timestamps assigned to individual transactions are fair, so is the resulting order.
Dr. Leemon Baird explains why Hashgraph could serve as a superior alternative to blockchain (2019)
The Hedera software is written so that no one can freeze HBAR, or HBAR accounts, or smart contracts, or HCS (Hedera Consensus Service) topics, or files. Not even the Governing Council has the ability to freeze things. Moreover, HBAR cannot be inflated or burned.
Because there are no miners to influence the ordering of transactions in Hashgraph, there is no MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) risk.
Interoperability
The EthereumJ virtual machine was replaced with the Hyperledger Besu virtual machine in the Hedera Services. This migration enables Hedera to maintain parity with Ethereum Mainnet evolutions such as the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) container formats, new opcodes, and precompiled contracts. Sourcehashport is the enterprise-grade public utility that facilitates the movement of digital assets between distributed networks. It relies on the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) and Hedera Token Service (HTS) to ensure that digital asset transfers/creations are authenticated at the native speeds of the Hedera public network. Source Website
Jesse Whiteside, Director of Business Development at hashport, talks about the Web3 transition from legacy networks to more efficient and scalable networks like Hedera (Gossip about Gossip, 2022)
Smart Contracts
Hedera is working to better support Solidity and Vyper smart contracts, but doing so in a way that works for enterprise workloads and meets dapp developer needs. This is done with a combination of performance improvements, design decisions, and developer experience enhancements. In particular, for smart contract performance, Hedera improved the EVM's processing speed, achieving the equivalent of what Ethereum targets for an entire block, typically in 13 seconds, in a single second. SourceBy using Hashgraph, smart contract developers can deliver a better user experience via :
- Low, predictable gas fees
- Transaction finality in seconds
- Carbon negative operations
- Secure, leaderless architecture
Dr. Leemon Baird talks about HTS (Hedera Token Service) and Smart Contracts 2.0 (2022)
Fees
The Hedera fees are set in USD, but paid in HBAR. This ensures that clients are protected from HBAR volatility, while providing predictability in fee costs, which is what enterprises are mainly looking for. SourceThe Governing Council determines the Hedera fees, based on the burden placed on the network - the amount of bandwidth, CPU/GPU, RAM, and hard drive storage that a transaction or query consumes. The greater the burden, the greater the fee. Additionally, because the aforementioned resources vary in their scarcity, transactions that use proportionally more of a scarce resource will pay proportionally more. Source
Transaction fees on Hedera consist of a service, network, and node fee. Users of Hedera only ever see a single transaction fee, but it's useful to understand what's packed inside.
Node fee
It compensates the node that first processes a transaction (submitting it to the rest of the network) or query for the costs associated with that processing.
Network fee
It compensates the network for the costs associated with calculating consensus for a transaction.
Service fee
It compensates the network for the costs associated with providing the ongoing service associated with a transaction.
Development
Hedera has allocated approximately 20% of total supply towards the development of the Hedera ecosystem ($5 billion / 10.7 billion HBAR). The independent HBAR Foundation will have autonomy over the administration, development, and deployment of these funds, and will provide grants to developers, startups, and other organizations to accelerate the development and adoption of the Hedera network for a wide variety of applications in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), gaming and other industries. Source
Shayne Higdon, CEO of The HBAR Foundation, explains how fund resources are allocated (2022)
Developers can interact with the Hedera Token Service in their Solidity contracts using
ERC-20 (Fungible), ERC-721 (Non-Fungible), and ERC-1155 (Multi-Token) standards. Source
The Hedera JSON-RPC Relay is an open source project that implements the Ethereum
JSON-RPC standard. It allows developers and users to interact with Hedera nodes to deploy, query and execute contracts as they normally would using familiar Ethereum tools. Source
Staking
Staking is a mechanism that allows users to stake their HBAR to nodes that are validating network transactions. The main purpose of Staking is to add security to Hedera's consensus protocol - transactions are validated and placed into consensus only after they are validated by nodes representing an aggregate stake of over two-thirds of the network's total number of HBAR. In simpler terms, the Hedera network is secure as long as two-thirds of its nodes are honest.Users who stake their HBAR to secure the network are rewarded in HBAR - passive income. Hedera's Governing Council has voted to implement a maximum cap of 6.5% annual staking reward rate. The actual reward rate will vary depending on how many HBAR are staked for rewards, but the rate will not exceed the cap (or 1 billion HBAR per year).
Staking was activated on Oct 22, 2022. Users can stake/unstake anytime (no lock-up period). Rewards are distributed at 24-hour intervals. Users need to collect their rewards on a daily basis if they want those rewards to be compounded into staking too (the unclaimed rewards are not staked by default).
Users can only collect rewards that have accumulated in the last 365 days. If a user stakes for 1000 days, never collecting a reward, and on the 1001st day he collects the rewards, he will only get rewards for the latest 365 days (he will not earn rewards for the preceding 635 days). Source
The full list of nodes and the latest staking reward rate can be visualized on HashScan.
You can stake your HBAR on HashPack / Blade Wallet / WallaWallet and more.
Wallets
Hashpack is a leading Hedera wallet that gives you complete control of your funds while keeping your data securely encrypted. Hashpack's 100% non-custodial nature means that you are always in complete control of your private keys, not Hashpack. Consequently, Hashpack can never access your funds or suspend transactions. In the rare event that HashPack were to ever shut down, you can simply import your account data to any other Hedera wallet. Website
Interview with May Chan, CEO of Hashpack (2022)
Blade Wallet is a non-custodial enterprise-grade B2C (Business to Consumer) Hedera wallet that is security audited and certified by CertiK. Website
Interview with Sami Mian, CEO of Blade Wallet (2022)
Wallawallet is an audited Hedera wallet that ties its security to your biometrics. To use the wallet, you need to have biometric authentification enabled on your mobile device. Since your private keys are securely stored and managed on your mobile device, never leaving the device, it is virtually impossible for an attacker to hack your Wallawallet data without having physical access to your mobile device and your biometrics. Website
Decentralization
Public v Private = who can USE the networkPermissioned v Permissionless = who can RUN the network
Today, the Hedera network is a public permissioned network. Consensus nodes that facilitate the network's transactions and manage its state are operated by Hedera Governing Council members, all of which have been invited to join as network operators. As the security, stability, and incentives of the Hedera network mature, the network will relax permissions by opening node operations to more entities and individuals.
Phase 1 During this initial phase, Hedera mainnet consensus nodes are permissioned, owned, and operated by Hedera Council members. This ensures that Hedera Council members are not only governing the network, but also directly participating in the network.
Phase 2 When the Hedera network's security, stability, and incentives are determined to be sufficient by the Hedera Governing Council, peripheral parties and organizations will be invited to join the Hedera mainnet as permissioned consensus node operators and earn HBAR cryptocurrency. The invited parties might include ecosystem partners, non-profit organizations, and other known and trusted entities.
Phase 3 Once the Hedera Governing Council has reached 39 members and up to hundreds of permissioned consensus nodes are live on the mainnet, the Hedera network will enter the final phase of decentralization and become a fully public permissionless network. Any person or organization will be able to run a Hedera mainnet consensus node with anonymity. All node operators will receive HBAR for the computing, bandwidth, and storage resources they use in contributing to consensus and providing services.
To maintain the security of the network, Hedera will remain permissioned until HBAR are sufficiently distributed (until the total value of all the circulating tokens is high enough to be too expensive for a malicious user, or group of users, to buy one-third of the total supply to conduct an attack). The slow release schedule is intended to provide for the stable and orderly growth of the network to reach scale without sacrificing the safety necessary for a truly useful and widespread network.
Dr. Leemon Baird presents Hedera's vision and methodical plan to go from a permissioned public network to a truly decentralized and permissionless public network with massive scale (2019)
As of May 2022, Dr. Leemon Baird, Mance Harmon, and the Hedera development and management teams transitioned to Swirlds Labs, a newly established entity partially owned by Swirlds. The Hedera Governing Council has entered into an agreement to outsource essential services previously performed by Hedera Hashgraph, LLC personnel to Swirlds Labs for the foreseeable future as the Council focuses on network governance, industry standards, public policy, and treasury management. Source
Dr. Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon discuss in detail the transition to Swirlds Labs, the importance of decentralizing operations, and the exciting developments ahead (2022)
Decentralization is not a single, swift movement. It is a continuously evolving path that requires thoughtful planning and execution. The entire path to decentralization will take years and is essential if Hedera is to achieve its vision of becoming The Trust Layer of the Internet. Source
Node Locations
- abrdn - Madrid, Spain
- Avery Dennison - Pennsylvania, USA
- Boeing - Washington, USA
- Chainlink Labs - Michigan, USA
- DBS - Republic of Singapore
- Dell Technologies - [ coming online soon ]
- Dentons - Republic of Singapore
- Deutsche Telekom - Berlin, Germany
- DLA Piper - London, UK
- EDF (Électricité de France) - Paris, France
- eftpos - Sydney, Australia
- FIS - Florida, USA
- Google - Helsinki, Finland
- IBM - Washington, USA
- IITM - Indian Institute of Technology Madras - Georgia, USA
- LG - Seoul, South Korea
- LSE (The London School of Economics and Political Science) - Virginia, USA
- Magalu - São Paulo, Brazil
- Nomura - Tokyo, Japan
- ServiceNow - Ogden, Utah
- Shinhan Bank - California, USA
- Standard Bank - Johannesburg, South Africa
- Swirlds - North Carolina, USA
- Tata Communications - California, USA
- Ubisoft - Republic of Singapore
- UCL (University College London) - London, UK
- Wipro - Mumbai, India
- Zain Group - Kuwait City, Kuwait
Source
Governance
Hedera's governance, modeled after Visa, consists of up to 39 term-limited organizations spread across six continents. The governing membership is designed to reflect a range of industries and geographies, to have highly respected brands and trusted market positions, and to encourage a wide variety of perspectives.A general-purpose public ledger should be governed by representatives from a broad range of market and geographic sectors, each with world-class expertise. Those responsible for network governance need technical expertise so they can competently manage the platform's underlying software. They need business and economics expertise so they can manage business operations of the organization and its cryptocurrency. They need legal expertise to help navigate the evolving regulatory environment. In other words, the network should be governed by a decentralized group of globally recognized industry leaders, representative of every market in the world.
All the Governing Council members have a 3-year maximum term, with up to 2 consecutive terms and an equal vote on network and platform decisions. Swirlds, the company that invented Hashgraph, is the only organization that has a permanent seat in the Governing Council. Currently, there are 28 organizations in the Governing Council.
abrdn
UK's largest investment company.
Wiki
- Founded in 1825
- 5,000+ employees
- £508 billion in assets under management
Duncan Moir, Senior Investment Manager of Alternative Investments at abrdn, talks about tokenizing investments on Hedera and how DLT is going to revolutionize the world of finance. (Gossip about Gossip, 2022)
Avery Dennison
A world leader in digital identification technologies, with a presence in 50+ countries. It provides branding and information labeling solutions, including pressure-sensitive materials, radio-frequency identification (RFID) inlays and tags.
Wiki
- Founded in 1935
- 35,000+ employees
- $8.4 billion revenue in 2021
Max Winograd, VP of Connected Products at Avery Dennison, talks about atma.io - the connected product cloud tracking the lifecycle impact of over 22 billion items across various industries and generating granular item-level emissions data using the Hedera network (Gossip about Gossip, 2022)
Boeing
The world's largest aerospace company, the largest airline manufacturer in the world, and the largest exporter in the United States by dollar value.
Wiki
- Founded in 1916
- 141,000+ employees
- $62.2+ billion revenue in 2021
Chainlink Labs
The leading provider of secure and reliable open-source oracle solutions, enabling smart contracts to access anything outside their native blockchain, such as off-chain data feeds, web APIs, and traditional bank payments.
Website
Mance Harmon and David Post, Managing Director of Business Development and Strategy for Chainlink Labs, discuss Chainlink Labs joining the Hedera Governing Council (Gossip about Gossip, 2021)
DBS
The largest bank in Southeast Asia.
Wiki
- Founded in 1968
- 33,000+ employees
- $10.5+ billion revenue in 2021
Dell Technologies
Dell's products include personal computers, servers, smartphones, televisions, computer software, computer security and network security, as well as information security services.
Wiki
- Founded in 2016 by merger
- 158,000+ employees
- $101+ billion revenue in 2021
Dentons
The world's largest law firm, with 200+ offices in 80+ countries.
Wiki
- Founded in 2013 by merger
- 11,000 attorneys
- $2.9+ billion revenue in 2021
Deutsche Telekom
One of the world's leading integrated telecommunications companies - the largest telecommunications provider in Europe by revenue - with a presence in 50+ countries.
Wiki
- Founded in 1995
- 226,000+ employees
- 248+ million customers
- €108+ billion revenue in 2021
Deutsche Telekom explains why they like Hedera and where they envision using it (2019)
DLA Piper
One of the largest business law firms in the world, with offices in 40+ countries.
Wiki
- Founded in 2005 by merger
- $3.5 billion revenue in 2021
Scott Thiel, Partner at DLA Piper, describes why DLA Piper joined the Hedera Governing Council and the problems it is trying to solve by using Hedera technology (2019)
EDF - Électricité de France
A French multinational electric utility company, largely owned by the French state.
Wiki
- Founded in 1946
- 165,000 employees
- €84.5 billion revenue in 2021
eftpos
Australia's national debit card infrastructure.
Website
- Operating since 1984
- Accepted at nearly 1 million terminals
- 50+ million cards in the market
- 2+ billion transactions annually
FIS
The largest processing and payments company in the world.
Annually, it facilitates the movement of roughly $9 trillion through the processing of approximately 75 billion transactions in service to 20,000+ clients around the globe.
Wiki
- Founded in 1968
- 75,000+ employees
- $13.8+ billion revenue in 2021
Nabil Manji, Head of Crypto and Web3 at Worldpay from FIS, talks about Worldpay's recently launched USDC stablecoin settlement offering, Proof-of-Reserve on Hedera, enterprise trends in Web3 (Gossip about Gossip, 2022)
Google
"The most powerful company in the world".
Wiki
- Founded in 1998
- 140,000+ employees
- $256.7+ billion revenue in 2021
IBM
One of the largest technology corporations in the world and a leading provider of enterprise solutions, with operations in 171+ countries.
Wiki
- Founded in 1911
- 282,000+ employees
- $57.4 billion revenue in 2021
Shyam Nagarajan, Executive Partner at IBM Consulting for Blockchain, Web3, Metaverse, and Sustainability, provides an excellent in-depth look at the current DLT landscape (Gossip about Gossip, 2022)
IITM - Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Recognized as an Institute of National Importance and consistently rated as one of India's most prestigious universities.
Wiki
- Founded in 1959
- Founded in 1958
- 36,000+ employees
- $67.2+ billion revenue in 2021
- Founded in 1895
- Operating since 1992
- 40,000+ employees
- $6.5+ billion revenue in 2021
- Founded in 1925
- 26,000+ employees
- $11.2 billion revenue in 2021
- Founded in 2003
- 16,000+ employees
- 7,400 enterprise customers
- $5.8+ billion revenue in 2021
- Founded in 1897
- 1,000+ branches
- 20+ million customers
- $15.9+ billion revenue 2021
- Founded in 1862
- 54,000+ employees
- $13.7 billion revenue 2021
- Founded in 1986
- 12,000+ employees
- $2.1 billion in 2021
- Founded in 1868
- 935,000 employees
- $103 billion revenue in 2021
- Founded in 1986
- 21,000 employees
- $2.6 billion revenue in 2021
- Founded in 1826
- Founded in 1945
- 250,000+ employees
- $8.4+ billion revenue in 2021
- Founded in 1983
- 7,100 employees
- 51.7+ million customers
- $5 billion revenue in 2021
LG
A global leader and technology innovator in consumer electronics, home appliances and mobile communications.
Wiki
LSE - The London School of Economics and Political Science
UK's highly selective public research university - with an acceptance rate lower than Oxford or Cambridge - which focusses on social sciences, politics, law and economics.
It produced 18 Nobel laureates, shaped more billionaires than any other university, and taught 53 future heads of state.
Wiki
Magalu
A major online retailer in Latin America with 1,400+ stores.
Wiki
Nomura
One of the largest financial institutions in Japan, with a retail network of 117 branches. Operating in 30+ countries.
Wiki
ServiceNow
A software company that is powering enterprise workflows for 80% of the Fortune 500 companies.
Wiki
Nicola Attico, Senior Advisory Solution Consultant at ServiceNow, shares why ServiceNow joined the Hedera Governing Council and the distributed ledger use cases actively being researched (2022)
Shinhan Bank
The oldest bank in South Korea, with a global presence in 20+ countries.
Wiki
Standard Bank
The largest banking group in Africa by assets. It operates in 20 african countries.
Wiki
Ian Putter, from Standard Bank Group, explains how Standard Bank is working to drive network adoption across the African continent and his decision to run for the Hedera Board (Gossip about Gossip, 2022)
Swirlds
Creators of the Hashgraph distributed consensus platform.
Website
Tata Communications
An Indian telecommunications company that operates the largest [500,000+ km of subsea fibre and 210,000+ km of terrestrial fibre] wholly owned and most advanced subsea fibre network which underpins the internet backbone.
It carries around 30% of the world's internet routes.
It connects businesses to 80% of the world's cloud giants and 4 out of 5 mobile subscribers.
It serves 7,000+ customers globally that represent 300+ of the Fortune 500 companies.
Wiki
Tata Group is India's largest conglomerate, with products and services in 150+ countries. Wiki
Ubisoft
One of the largest video game publishers in the world, with 45+ development studios.
Wiki
UCL - University College London
London's leading multidisciplinary university, with more than 13,000 staff and 42,000 students from 150 countries. There have been 30 Nobel Prize laureates amongst UCL's alumni and current and former staff to date.
Wiki
Wipro
A leading technology services and consulting company focused on building innovative solutions that address clients' most complex digital transformation needs.
Wiki
Zain Group
The pioneer of mobile telecommunications in the Middle East - the first mobile operator in Kuwait.
Today, it is a leading mobile voice and data services operator with a commercial footprint in 7 Middle Eastern and Africa countries.
Wiki
Links
- Hedera Twitter YouTube LinkedIn Reddit Discord Brand Central FAQ Papers Roadmap Network Status Explorers Wallets News Blog Podcast Ecosystem NFTs
- For developers : Learning Center Documentation Technical Blog Articles Examples Tutorials Portal GitHub Grants Bounties
- Network metrics : DragonGlass Metrika Revenue Report Live Transactions
Articles
Videos
- The HBAR Bull - Weekly Video Updates about Hedera Hashgraph
- Dec 2017 : From Bitcoin To HBAR - Hedera Hashgraph Documentary - Mike Maloney
- May 2022 : Christian Hasker interview with Trust Crypto
- Oct 2022 : Shayne Higdon interview with Thinking Crypto
- Dec 2022 : Dr. Leemon Baird interview with Anthony Day
- Dec 2022 : Dr. Leemon Baird - Ecosystem Week
- Jan 2023 : Dr. Leemon Baird - Decentralized Recovery and Custody
- Feb 2023 : Dr. Leemon Baird - The Tech Talks Daily Podcast
- Feb 2023 : Shayne Higdon interview with CryptoCoinShow
- Feb 2023 : Mance Harmon interview with Paul Barron
- Feb 2023 : Dr. Leemon Baird interview with CryptoCoinShow
- Feb 2023 : Brandon Hargreaves and Mike Maloney talk about Hedera Hashgraph
Conclusion
I firmly believe that Hedera Hashgraph will serve as the distributed trust layer for the Internet of Things (IoT), for the Machine to Machine (M2M) economy, for supply chains, for identity, for ownership, for financial systems, for data storage, and many more. It will become so entrenched in our daily lives that we will be using it without even knowing - think TCP/IP.Disclaimer : I have invested in HBAR. Do not consider my opinions as investment advice. Please do your own research and make your own informed investment decisions. I'm active on Twitter if you want to connect with me.