Distributed ledger technology company Hedera Hashgraph LLC announced Monday that technology giant IBM Corp. and Indian telecommunications company Tata Communications have joined the Hedera governing council, a distributed ledger network envisioned to be faster and scale larger than current blockchain platforms on the market.

According to the company, eight of the 39 positions on the governing council have now been filled. IBM represents the largest technology company to back the network so far.

“Our goal is to create the most decentralized governing body of any of the major public platforms,” Mance Harmon, chief executive of Hedera, told Coindesk. “We’re covering multiple industries … and we’re wanting global coverage.”

The distributed ledger technology industry may be dominated primarily by blockchain technology, but Hedera lays claim to a different sort of DLT that it calls a hashgraph.

Hashgraphs differ from blockchains quite a bit, although both technologies allow for widescale distribution, decentralized application development and transaction security. The drawback of blockchains is low transaction rates, according to Leemon Baird (pictured), co-founder and chief scientist of Hedera and developer of the agreement protocol that the hashgraph runs on.

The hashgraph used by Hedera uses multiple channels of distributed agreement to achieve greater speeds than traditional blockchains.

For example, the bitcoin public blockchain can sustain up to five transactions per second and the Ethereum blockchain almost 12 TPS. With the Hedera hashgraph, it should be possible to exceed 10,000 TPS while also providing transaction finality in three to five seconds.

“Speed and security, having them both at the same time,” Baird told SiliconANGLE in an interview, speaking to the product requirements in Hedera’s network design. “The security we have is very high. This means that double-spends won’t happen and it’s hard for someone to shut down the network.”

Double-spends are a traditional fear for blockchain networks, which are designed to prevent this possibility through distributed agreement, but doing so slows down transaction speed. A double-spend happens when the same tokens are spent twice in rapid succession in an attempt to get receivers to both accept the transaction before it is finalized, causing one recipient to think they’ve gotten a payment when none happened.

“But you know what? Even the credit unions were more interested in the speed,” Baird added. “The truth is even at a small number of transactions per second, there’s things you can do, but at a large number, there’s more things you can do.”

The potential of the Hedera hashgraph network has been so compelling that the company has raised $124 million in investments. 

The company has also attracted developers to its platform. According to Hedera, development has begun on over 100 distributed applications, or DApps, that cross numerous industries including how pharmaceuticals come to market or managing supply chains.

“We’ve got 20,000 [developers] on our Telegram channel, we have an amazing response from our developer community,” Baird said. “We have a whole team that is working with them, to develop really interesting things and we have demonstrations and so on. My pitch to them is thank you because we have them… and there’s no limit to what you can do with speed and security at the same time.”

Baird added that many developers have already been creating DApps that will run on the hashgraph network because the company’s smart contract platform, Solidity, is fully compatible and has been around for some time.

With the addition of IBM and Tata to Hedera’s governing council, the company said in a statement, it will continue to push toward a sustainable governance model for DLT platforms as it continues to work on building its own enterprise-grade network.

Photo: Hedera