IBM, Deutsche Telekom, and Tata in Hedera Hashgraph’s Governing Council

Indian tech giant’s Tata Communications joins Hedera Hashgraph’s governing board, alongside IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom Blockchain and more than 30 other international companies, and share equal voting rights in one of the most significant blockchain projects of our era.

As distributed ledger technologies like blockchain, the backbone of Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, get more international attention on a legal and political scale, it becomes more difficult to control and be transparent on who’s actually sustaining and therefore utilizing a decentralized network’s tools.

The Hedera Hashgraph Platform, which was designed to be governed by up to 39 enterprise-level organizations, gives equal power to all members of what they call the “Hedera Hashgraph Council” guaranteeing the integrity of the codebase, and providing open access to the equally protected by all nodes core.













Unlike most traditional blockchain-backed networks, Hedera Hashgraph doesn’t give just anyone the opportunity to maintain the network, instead, the roles are assigned specifically to an army of the best tech titans, with prehistory in networking, cybersecurity, and telecommunications.

Hedera Hashgraph manages to create an environment where multiple advanced technology companies are simultaneously working together on creating solutions, protecting the network’s integrity, maintain the network as needed.

The respective companies, with IBM, and Tata, being the latest additions, are all coming from different parts of the world and carry a different approach on what’s next when we’re talking about technological advancement.

If anything, that could be the first truly decentralized distributed ledger network, as it is maintained by different ideologies, with equal rights, and with the knowledge, funds, and tech to support the network indefinitely.

The HBAR Token

The Hedera Hashgraph unlike other privately funded blockchains like IBM’s Hyperledger, or R3’s Corda, will actually have its own cryptocurrency called HBAR and we will be able to purchase it through crypto exchange markets by the end of the summer.

HBAR will have a total supply of 50 billion tokens, the native currency of a network that appears as a combination of Facebook’s Libra, and the Ethereum Blockchain.

Hedera Hashgraph is following a Proof Of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism model, and it will be mainly used to produce DApps.

Other cryptocurrency projects with analogical token supplies include Ripple’s XRP, and Tron.

It would be harder to crack into an IBM-backed network, compared to a network run by your neighbor.

In Blockchain platforms such as Bitcoin let’s say, you have the whitepaper and the whales telling you it’s decentralized, but what happens if you have 1 BTC, and your neighbor 20? Or what happens when you don’t even mine Bitcoin, but your neighbor has a mining firm?

For these reasons, Hedera Hashgraph’s license and policies are tailored to provide an as unbiased as possible solution to maintain network operations with security, accuracy, and integrity.

Hedera has Permissionless Consensus (or Open Consensus) with a closed Governance Model. This separation of governance from consensus is designed to ensure continued decentralization over time. Hedera’s governance terms ensure no single member will have control, and no small group of members will have undue influence over the body as a whole. When it comes to consensus, the network will expand to millions of nodes, all of which vote on distributed consensus. – From Hedera Hashgraph’s White Paper

IBM is not a newcomer to the blockchain, and in fact, owns the most blockchain-related patents worldwide.

Read our previous articles about IBM’s new web-browser designed on blockchain, and how IBM changes the supply-chain industry using blockchain to get a glimpse of their activities in the DLT scene.

While Tata is new to DLTs, the hundreds billion-dollar Indian company shouldn’t be taken lightly, as it owns a big chunk of EU’s and American tech brands, metal industries, car companies and more.