Announcement

Today I’m transitioning from an intern to a full time employee, and joining Hedera Hashgraph as a Software Developer. I couldn’t be more excited about joining the great team that is working to launch the Hedera Hashgraph public network. This means that I’ll only be returning to school at the University of Arizona part time while finishing up my studies, although I will still be assuming my position as the lead organizer of Hack Arizona.

What we’re building

Hedera is a public network built on top of Dr. Leemon Baird’s Hashgraph consensus algorithm, and we have recently raised over 100 million dollars.

Hashgraph allows a group to come agreement on the ordering of transactions (cryptocurrency), or parallelly executing code (smart contracts), which can be used to yield an ACID compliant datastore that is asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant.

The conensus algorithm, hashgraph, itself is uniquely patented (i.e., 1, 2, 3), which means that we can guarentee our network will never fork; something which has historically resulted in uncertainty for both developers building applications or infrastructure on the network, and those who wish to purchase a given cryptocurrency.

Hedera has been granted a non-revokable license to use the Hashgraph conesnsus algorithm, and will launch with APIs that support three initial services:

• Cryptocurrency (HBAR),
• File storage,
• and Smart contracts (using Solidity and the EVM).

Hedera can handle over 100k cryptocurrency transactions per second within a single shard - compared to 10-20 tps with traditional, blockchain based public networks - and doesn’t require computationally or environmentally costly processes, such as Proof of Work. This allows our fees to be tenths or hundredths of a penny (compared to 30 cents + 3% from traditional payment providers, like Stripe), and have conensus finality with a probability of 1 within seconds (which a blockchain fundamentally never achieves).

You can read the Hashgraph consensus algorithm’s whitepaper here, or the Hedera public network’s whitepaper here.

Why Hedera

I’m convinced by the potential of a decentralized internet, and believe it is the answer to many of the issues plauging the modern internet economy. In addition to solving a majority of existing monetization strategies, it also provides fundamentally new opportunities; including banking the over 1.5B throughout the world who have access to smart phones but no banking services.

I think that censorship resistant, user data rights focused, decentralized projects like: Ethereum, us at Hedera, the Interplanetary File System, and Tim Berner Lee’s newly announced Solid, are the most exciting technologies since http, or perhaps search.

Although it’s not universally clear what this future might look like, in my purview it includes coordination and interoperability of decentralized payment and code execution environments, i.e., public ledgers (e.g., Ethereum / Hedera), as well as decentralized identity and data management solutions (e.g., Solid / IPFS).

There is still a very long way to go, and we’re in the very early days of bulding this new infrastructure (about 10 years since the publication of Bitcoin’s whitepaper), let alone the subsequent decentralized applications.

I’m very excited to be a part of what I think is going to be the next iteration of computing, which will hopefully allow users to retain the rights to their data, no longer require us to share personal or private information with the businesses which we transact with, and allow a more fair exchange of value on the web.

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Last updated on: 12/4/18