Ping Identity Makes Strategic Seed Investment in Hashgraph Distributed Consensus Platform

COLLEGE STATION, TX and NEW ORLEANS (Cloud Identity Summit)—June 6, 2016—Swirlds, building the trust layer for the internet, today emerged from stealth and launched its hashgraph distributed consensus platform, free for public download and use by developers. Swirlds also announced a seed funding round led by Ping Identity. Together with Ping Identity, Swirlds will demonstrate early stage proof of concept for a new identity management system, one of the many applications that can be built on the Swirlds platform, at the Cloud Identity Summit on June 6-9 in New Orleans.

Businesses today need trusted, distributed applications that are not controlled by any single organization for uses such as distributed identity directories, online auctions, stock markets, cryptocurrencies, and multiplayer games. While early distributed consensus networks like blockchain have gained recognition for their potential to solve the challenges in creating trust within peer-to-peer networks, early networks like blockchain have practical limitations. Swirlds is a platform to build and run shared worlds — fully distributed, fast, fair applications that create trust in peer-to-peer networks without the need for a central server.

Swirlds hashgraph – bringing new power to distributed consensus

The Swirlds hashgraph goes beyond blockchain, providing new capabilities not previously possible with existing blockchain technology. The hashgraph enforces fairness, which is needed for matching buyers and sellers in auctions and stock markets. It provides low latency, low cost, high throughput and high security, without requiring proof-of-work. Users quickly receive absolute proof of the consensus results of their actions. Developers can build smart contracts using the full power of Java, and go beyond contracts to build entire shared worlds. (White paper on the Swirlds hashgraph consensus algorithm can be found at www.swirlds.com/Overview-of-Swirlds-Hashgraph.pdf.

Said Dr. Leemon Baird, founder and CEO of Swirlds, and featured CIS speaker, “Current stock markets are fair in matching buyers and sellers, but they require trust in a single company. Systems like Bitcoin have distributed trust, but do not ensure fair ordering of events. Swirlds provides the first distributed consensus platform that can be both fair and distributed, with high performance at scale.”

Dr. Baird continued, “Developers can create the next generation of ledgers, markets, identity applications, games, cryptocurrencies, and social collaboration applications on the Swirlds platform. They can go beyond simply recording events, to creating shared worlds where community rules are enforced and smart contracts are executed, not limited to interpreted scripting languages, but with the full speed of Java. By providing this trust layer, Swirlds allows fairness and consensus to inherently co-exist, while ensuring that transactions in these applications happen efficiently and reliably.”

Ping Identity invests in Swirlds – first to build identity apps on new platform

Ping Identity, the leader in Identity Defined Security, enables the right people to access the right applications using any device, from anywhere. In addition to its strategic investment in Swirlds, Ping announced a preview of their technology collaboration with Swirlds, to be demonstrated at the Cloud Identity Summit. Ping Identity plans to work with Swirlds and is announcing a technology preview program with an aim to create a new standard for Distributed Session Management. The DSM system will reduce risk by enabling a global session logout capability across all active Single Sign-On and Application Sessions, across cloud, mobile and enterprise applications, independent of the identity protocol being used. In addition, the administrator receives validation when each application receives and executes the session logout request.

“With the hashgraph approach to distributed consensus, which enables fairness, high throughput, enforced rules and trust — and growth to internet scale — Swirlds is the ideal platform for distributed identity applications,” said Patrick Harding, CTO of Ping Identity. “We are pleased to have made this strategic investment in Swirlds, and look forward to driving this exciting opportunity forward.”

On Tuesday June 7, Dr. Baird will lead CIS sessions at Studio 9/10 on the Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus for Identity (3:05 – 3:30 p.m. ET) and Developing for Swirlds Hashgraph (4:20 – 5:20 p.m. ET). Visit Swirlds and Ping Identity in booth #3, and contact [email protected] for a meeting and more information.

Supporting Technical Papers

Overview of Swirlds Hashgraph: www.swirlds.com/Overview-of-Swirlds-Hashgraph.pdf

Swirlds and Sybil Attacks: www.swirlds.com/Swirlds-and-Sybil-Attacks.pdf

Hashgraph Consensus: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance: www.swirlds.com/Hashgraph-Consensus.pdf

Dictatorship, Democracy, and Blockchain: www.swirlds.com/Dictatorship-Democracy-and-Blockchain.pdf

About Swirlds

Swirlds is a platform to build and run shared worlds — fully distributed applications that harness the power of the cloud without servers. Applications built on the Swirlds platform create trust in peer-to-peer networks without a central server, while ensuring fairness, such as in auctions, markets, and multiplayer games. Leveraging the new hashgraph consensus algorithm, the Swirlds platform enables developers to build applications that are fair, fast, secure and trusted. Swirlds — building the trust layer of the internet. www.swirlds.com | @Swirlds.

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