Leemon Baird

Leemon Baird is the inventor of the hashgraph distributed consensus algorithm and the co-founder and chief scientist of Hedera. Hedera is the only public ledger that uses hashgraph consensus, a faster, more secure alternative to blockchain consensus mechanisms. Hashgraph works efficiently to verify transactions while ensuring the highest standard of security to prevent malicious attacks.

Apart from his work for Hedera, Leemon Baird is the co-founder and CTO of Swirlds Inc. With over 20 years of technology and startup experience, he has held positions as a Professor of Computer Science at the Air Force Academy, Adjunct Professor at multiple other prestigious universities, and as a senior scientist in several labs. He has been the co-founder of several startups, including two identity-related start-ups with successful exits. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University faster than any student in school history (2 years, 9 months), has multiple patents, and over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals on computer security, machine learning, and mathematics. He regularly keynotes these topics at conferences.

As the Founder of Hedera

Hedera is a decentralized enterprise-grade public network on which anyone can build secure, fair applications with finality in a few seconds. The platform is owned and governed by a council of the world’s leading organizations including Avery Dennison, Boeing, Dentons, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, eftpos, Électricité de France (EDF), FIS (WorldPay), Google, IBM, LG Electronics, Magalu, Nomura, Standard Bank Group, Swirlds, Tata Communications, University College London (UCL), Wipro, and Zain Group. Hedera Hashgraph is a platform that presents itself as a faster and more secure alternative to blockchain.

It sidesteps energy-intensive mining by using a technology called Directed Acyclic Graph.

Hedera Hashgraph claims to be capable of processing 10,000 cryptocurrency transactions per second (TPS). Hedera’s white paper suggests that the number of transactions that Hashgraph can process is only limited by the bandwidth available to each node on the network. However, analysts have argued that bandwidth is not the bottleneck on the speed at which transactions are processed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

According to Baird: Hedera is “the only public ledger that can use hashgraph, the innovative and efficient consensus algorithm, which allows for “fast, fair, and secure transactions to take place in adversarial network environments”. The Hedera network “requires less electricity and cost to operate than a blockchain-based system”.