Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera Hashgraph has returned to Insureblocks to discuss the exciting news of Google joining the Hedera Hashgraph Governing Council. We also discussed the addition of Hedera’s new service entitled, Hedera Consensus Service, which brings interesting opportunities for enterprise blockchain platforms such as Hyperledger and Corda to embrace the opportunity to create verifiable timestamps and ordering of events to a public level trust.

 

What is blockchain and what is hashgraph?

Blockchain as a term refers to two things:

* A data structure which is a chain of blocks of transactions

* A consensus algorithm that enables a community of participants, each of which holds a local copy of that chain of blocks to come to an agreement or consensus on which block to put next on the top of that chain in order for everyone to keep a consistent chain of blocks

Unfortunately such a blockchain is designed to be slow for a number of reasons:

* Proof of work, the use of a really hard cryptographic puzzle, to reach consensus is time consuming

* From an architectural standpoint, having a single chain that everyone uses is also limiting

Hashgraph, similarly is a term that refers to both a data structure and a consensus algorithm. Hashgraph’s data structure is a graph, in a mathematical sense, whose nodes or vertices are linked together with hashes cryptographically.

Its consensus algorithm makes it possible for those that have a copy of the hashgraph to calculate how the other nodes in the network would vote in order to come to an agreement on the order of transactions.

Because it’s a graph rather than a chain, all of the transactions are flowing into the network, can be processed simultaneously without the need for proof of work.

Hashgraph thus removes the two constraining factors of blockchain: no need for proof of work and a graph instead of a single chain. The result is much higher performance and higher level of security due hashgraph using asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance.

 

 

What is Hedera Hashgraph?

 

 

Google joins Hedera’s Governing Council

The Council was designed to provide a governing body that the market would trust in doing a good job in terms of shepherding this global network to full maturity and beyond. The Council makes decisions on a wide range of topics such as product roadmap and in control of treasury management.  Council members can serve up to two or three year terms. The Council will ultimately be composed of 39 members to represent the full range of use cases across industries, geographies and through time. The council members are chosen to be the largest and most respected members in their categories and geographies. Today there are 11 members: Swisscom blockchain, Tata communications, Nomura, IBM, Boeing, Google, Magalu, Deutsche Telekom, FIS, DLA Piper, and Swirlds.

On the 11th of February, Google became the 11th member of the Hedera Governing Council.

Hedera is a Delaware based LLC, which is a business vehicle with a legal existence separate and distinct from its owners. Council members are members of the LLC in the legal sense.