The long-awaited mainnet of the Hedera Hashgraph project is now released. It is backed by some of the world’s largest corporations as well as promising faster transactions and scalability than any blockchain currently released.
Details Regarding Hedera
In December 2018, the network was released in a testing environment to a group of corporations and developers. Now, anyone can make an account or build a dApp. The Hashgraph is similar to a blockchain but a different consensus mechanism is in place regarding the state of the distributed ledger. With the mainnet now live, Hedera will start to distribute HBAR tokens. More than 379 million of them will go to investors, who participated in the $124 million crowd sale held in three stages between March 2018 and August 2018. Advisors, vendors and other participants will receive around 1.95 million tokens on the first day. The total supply of 50 billion HBAR tokens is planned to be released over the span of 15 years by the governing council of the network.
Hashgraph stands out from other distributed ledger technologies with its efficiency and larger transaction capacity. These qualities make it suitable more for enterprises and commerce. The project is supposed to be capable of 10,000 transactions per second compared to 2.8 per second for Bitcoin and even the 15 for Ethereum.
“This is the first instance globally of hashgraph being put to the test. It is a different data structure, different technology and looks nothing like a blockchain, but solves the same kinds of problems with better security and better performance.” – Hedera CEO Mance Harmon, CoinDesk interview
Private Networks and Their Link to Hashgraph
Already hundreds of developers are active on the network and around 25 are running their own dApps that were integrated into the mainnet before the launch as per a statement from Harmon. Hashgraph is still considered to be a beta build since the consensus service and a few other key features that are planned for v1.0 have not yet been released. The Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) will make a link between the private blockchains and the hashgraph. Thus allowing hashing of transactions from other networks to be ordered in Hedera with a record of when the transactions occurred with a search function will be trusted by a decentralized network.
Decentralized Governance and Distribution
The governing council of Hedera will consist of world-leading organizations such as Boeing, IBM, Nomura Holdings, Tata Communications, FIS Global and others. Each council member will run its own node via the hashgraph algorithm.
The initial cryptocurrency exchanges and over-the-counter desks that have announced their plan to support HBAR tokens are AlgoZ, BitOoda, Bering Waters, Bittrex, Carbon, Galaxy Digital, Galois, GSR, Liquid, OkCoin, OKEx, OSL, Upbit and xFutures.
Project Appraisal
Of course, such an ambitious project that claims such groundbreaking functions will be a target of criticism. A blockchain specialist named Eric Wall voiced his opinion in a recent post on Medium stating – “A dApp requires smart contracts and since Hedera is currently throttling 10 transactions per second with smart contracts, then it doesn’t make this any more interesting than Ethereum which supports roughly 15 transactions per second with smart contracts.”
“I can’t predict the future of what Hedera will transition to in the future, but moving away from a model that is based on economic and game theory guarantees to a trusted model is a severe reduction in the neutrality model of the system.” Wall adds. He is right to be sceptical as the 10,000 transactions per second ability have not been proven yet. It might be a marketing strategy in order to pull as much attention from investors as possible and take advantage of their misinformation regarding these protocols.
Eric Wall also thinks that Hedera’s consensus service is actually nothing new. He stated that sidechains have also been created off of public blockchains that take advantage of the consensus strength that is in the underlying system.