coinspeaker.com
In a major breakthrough development, tech giants IBM and the Tata Communications group of India have officially joined the governance council of Hedera Hashgraph. Hedera Hashgraph is a public network similar to blockchain specifically designed for businesses and enterprises.
Just a year ago in August 2018, Hedera raised a whopping $124 million for future developments, despite a massive slowdown in the crypto market. The Hedera network is backed by some of the industry giants like hedgefund BlockTower Capital and the Digital Currency Group.
Hedera plans to have a total of 39 members in its governing council. Apart from the latest entrants like Tata and IBM, some other big members include Deutsche Telecom AG and Nomura Co Ltd. Speaking to CoinDesk, Hedera CEO Mance Harmon said:
“Our goal is to create the most decentralized governing body of any of the major public platforms. We’re covering multiple industries … and we’re wanting global coverage.”
Hedera’s Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) works differently compared to other blockchain networks. The Hedera network supports distributed file storage along with micropayments and smart contracts. In the future, it also plans to support the merging of the private network into public and take the benefit of its transaction ordering mechanism.
Adding Feather to Its Cap
With giants like IBM and Tata partnering with Hedera, the Hedera project will get a huge boost. Besides, IBM notes that Hedera’s unique ability to unify private and public network is of key interest to them. IBM says that it will use this feature to create trust in the company’s Hyperledger Fabric networks.
In his turn, Bryan Gross, principal offering manager of the IBM Blockchain Platform, noted:
“The most exciting part is the proposed Hedera Consensus Service. It has the potential to provide the core innovation of proof-of-work blockchains, like bitcoin and ethereum, without the performance and privacy trade-offs that are typically associated with these networks.”
Adding to it, Hedera chief Harmon said: “Hedera Consensus Service makes it possible for Hyperledger projects out there to use the service to put transactions in order and eliminate the need for them to stand up nodes for transaction ordering, and they get the trust model of a public network”.
Harmon thinks that with major giants like IBM and Tata joining the Hedera network will help in its further decentralization. The Hedera governance as such includes many checks that prevent any sort of power centralization taking place. The council members have an equal say in setting up policies for the network as well as approving updates to Hedera’s codebase.