Google Joins the Hedera Hashgraph Governing Council Google joins IBM, Tata Communications, and other major corporations on Dallas-based Hedera's Governing Council, which is tasked with supporting the distributed ledger technology.

Google has announced that its joining the year-old Hedera Governing Council, a strategic planning group for Hedera Hashgraph’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) network.

“We’re inspired by what Hedera has accomplished to date, and look forward to providing the infrastructure and technologies to support what’s possible with distributed ledger technology, wrote Allen Day, developer advocate of Google Cloud, in a company blog post.

The council is tasked with governing changes to the Hedera software, which is run by millions of Hedera distributed nodes, to ensure decentralized governance for Hedera’s next-gen DLT platform. The group of multinational companies also ensures the stability and reliability of the network protocols and operations. The members depict a diverse range of industries, from telecom to financial services to retail.

Google Cloud will operate a Hedera network node and data available for analytics. Hedera has also chosen Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider for public telnets and the Hedera Consensus ecosystem.

“We initially turned to Google Cloud for its ease of use, networking advantages and overall platform performance,” said Atul Mahamuni, SVP of Products for Hedera, in Google’s post. “The Google Cloud Platform was the perfect foundation to help us achieve our goals to bring enterprise-ready DLT adoption at scale.”

About a year ago, Hedera Hashgraph launched its Governing Council, a group that would govern changes to its software. Initial members included Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, Magazine Luiza, Nomura Holdings Inc., and Swisscom Blockchain AG, with Hedera later adding IBM and Tata Communications.



Hedera had previously stated the Council could potentially include up to 39 members, with each temporarily serving a maximum of two consecutive three-year terms.

“Our governance model, which includes a robust system of checks and balances, ensures power can’t be consolidated, while at the same time providing a stable and scalable platform on which developers can build,” Hedera CEO Mance Harmon has previously said. “The Hedera Governing Council’s pioneering approach to decentralized DLT governance lays the foundation for a fair and stable commercial platform, while the hashgraph distributed consensus algorithm provides the security and performance required by enterprise customers.”

The “stewards of the platform” all have equal say when it comes to updating Hedera’s platform codebase or setting policies. By having a governance model, Hedera said users are protected, the integrity of the codebase is guaranteed, and the source code is open for review.

DLT is a blockchain-adjacent tech. Hedera developed an enterprise-ready DLT platform based on the hashgraph consensus algorithm and began open access last September. For businesses, Hedera’s platform provides access to an open public network along with the technical capability to deliver large volumes of transactions faster, more securely, and at a less expense.

The Google post highlighted the capability of quickly processing a high volume of transactions as a differentiator between Hedera’s network and related technologies: “While many recent DLT advancements have occurred primarily on top of public and permissionless DLTs such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, the challenge of delivering fast and inexpensive transactions with finality has slowed the rate of DLT adoption by large enterprises that require the ability to process thousands of transactions per second.”

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