Hedera Hashgraph

Founded by Dr. Leemon Baird, Hedera is a public distributed ledger for building decentralised applications. Its users can build secure, fair, blazing-fast decentralised applications on top of the Hedera platform. Hedera is the most used enterprise-grade public network for its users to make their digital world exactly as they like it. HBAR is the native, energy-efficient cryptocurrency of Hedera that powers the decentralised economy. 

Hedera goes beyond blockchain for developers- startups, enterprises, creators, or even consumers, to create the next era of fast, fair, and secure applications. The Hedera proof-of-stake public network, powered by hashgraph consensus, achieves the highest grade of security possible (ABFT), with blazing-fast transaction speeds and incredibly low bandwidth consumption. By combining high throughput, low fees, and finality in seconds, Hedera leads the way for the future of public ledgers. 

Unlike blockchains, a hashgraph does not use miners to validate its transactions. Instead, it uses a “gossip about gossip” protocol to create directed acyclic graphs for time-sequencing transactions without bundling them into blocks.

In 2015 – 2016, Leemon Baird developed the breakthrough innovation now called hashgraph. A few months later, Baird and his long-time friend and business partner, Mance Harmon, formed Swirlds, Inc. (a portmanteau of “shared worlds”) to develop proofs of concept, commercialise hashgraph for private implementations, and battle-test it in permissioned environments. Their larger and longer-term vision is to use hashgraph to enable a truly decentralised, fast, fair, and secure public distributed ledger that could achieve mainstream adoption and serve as the “trust layer of the Internet". 

During 2017-18, funds from the seed investment round of Swirlds is used to bootstrap the formation of Hedera, and the founders develop the main governance philosophy of the company. Conceptualising of the structure and designating the role of the council, determining the licensing terms for use of hashgraph for public implementation, and developing the strategy to prevent forking were the other key areas that became a part of planning for Hedera. 

During the third quarter of 2017, Hashgraph Consortium, LLC was created as a Delaware limited liability company. Hashgraph technology was also displayed publicly for the very first time to the world at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, CA. In the first quarter of 2018, the first formal meeting of the executive team and advisors was held. It was here that "Hedera" was selected as a brand for the company name, and its logo was designed. The Hedera Launch event was held on March 13, 2018, in NYC, drawing 1,000 people live and more than 50,000 livestream viewers. Dr. Baird and Mance's vision for a public network was unveiled at the same event. HederaHashgraph.com went live and Hedera Whitepaper was also published during the same time. 

Hedera mainnet went live on August 24, 2018, and 50 billion hbars were minted. Following this, Hedera 18, the first developer conference and global hackathon, took place at eight locations across the world. During the same year, COQ Proof, conducted by Carnegie Mellon, confirmed that the hashgraph algorithm is Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant. This was, to date, the only algorithm in the public market to achieve this gold standard of security. Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) was launched on the mainnet on February 13, 2020. It afforded the developers a unique opportunity to create verifiable timestamps and ordering of events for any application. Hedera.com went live shortly after that. 

By the end of the second quarter of 2020, Hedera had surpassed Ethereum in the daily number of transactions processed. Hedera's Mirror Node software entered beta on July 07, 2020, and its preview net went live on July 23, 2020. The Hedera Public Mirror Node, a publicly accessible, free-to-use mainnet Mirror Node operated by the Hedera team, became available on June 25, 2021. 

Hedera council members' list includes Swirlds, as well as Google, Boeing, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, LG, Tata Communications, Électricité de France, FIS, University College London, the London School of Economics, DLA Piper, Shinhan Bank, Standard Bank, ServiceNow, Ubisoft, and several others. The Hedera Governing Council has voted to purchase the patent rights to Hashgraph and make the algorithm open source under the Apache License in 2022.

Hedera is dedicated to building a trusted and secure online world that empowers the masses. It aims to build a platform where its users can work, play, buy, sell, create and engage socially while ensuring safety and privacy.

Hedera envisions making a digital future accessible to all. It strives to create a global digital community that leverages the participants to engage for a better future.