Hedera Hashgraph has launched its long-awaited public network, backed by some of the world’s largest corporations and promising faster transactions and greater capacity to scale than any blockchain to date. Hedera treasury is set to begin distributing the system’s HBAR tokens around 01:00 UTC. The first tokens – more than 379 million – will go to investors who participated in a $124 million crowd sale that took place in three rounds from March 2018 to August 2018.
Another 1.95 million tokens will go to advisors, vendors and other participants on day one. The balance of the 50 billion supply of HBARs is to be released over the next 15 years by the network’s governing council.
Twelve cryptocurrency exchanges and over-the-counter (OTC) desks plan to list HBAR for trading: AlgoZ, BitOoda, Bering Waters, Bittrex, Galaxy Digital, GSR, Liquid, OKEx, OKCoin, OSL, Upbit and xFutures.
A year and a half in the making, the hashgraph stands out from other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) in several ways. Its creators claim it works more efficiently than blockchains, making it more suitable for enterprises and commerce. Specifically, Hedera says the network can support up to 10,000 transactions per second, compared to 2.8 per second for bitcoin and 15 for ethereum, the two largest blockchains.
“This is the first instance globally of hashgraph being put to the test,” Hedera CEO Mance Harmon told CoinDesk. “It’s 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.”
Hashgraph proponents also say its proof-of-stake consensus mechanism is fairer than bitcoin’s proof-of-work, allowing transactions to come in the order they were recorded and to all settle in the same amount of time. Hedera’s code is patented rather than open-source, a condition the network says it will enforce to deter copying of the codebase or forking.
Not least of all, Hedera boasts the imprimatur of blue-chip names, with IBM, Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, Tata, Nomura and bank tech vendor FIS represented on its governing council, whose members run nodes and vote on software updates.
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