Hedera Hashgraph Raises $100 Million; Seeking Another $20 Million via Crowdsale

The Hedera Hashgraph alternative blockchain platform has successfully raised $100 million through a future token sale targeted at institutional investors. As first reported by VentureBeat on August 1, 2018, the Hedera Hashgraph team is primed to use the funds to develop a new distributed public ledger that would be faster, more secure, and more efficient, than current blockchain systems.

The Hashgraph Consensus

The Texas-based blockchain startup has raised 100 million dollars from institutional investors to help the team actualize its goal of building lightning fast, secure and reliable distributed ledger.

Per the Hedera Hashgraph team, the network can reportedly handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second in a single cluster of computers and is much faster than the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.

“Small systems have achieved this in the past, but never at scale. Bitcoin had terrible performance, but it is reasonably secure. It was always a trade-off. What Hashgraph does for the first time is break that trade-off, maximizing both security and performance, ” said CEO of Hedera Hashgraph Mance Harmon.

The Hedera Hashgraph distributed ledger makes it easy for parties to transact or arrive at a distributed consensus in a fast and frictionless manner, without third parties. Unlike the Bitcoin network that uses the Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm to confirm transactions, Hedera Hashgraph uses the “virtual voting consensus algorithm,” a protocol the team claims to be much faster than PoW.

According to Harmon, Hashgraph is looking to confirm transactions by at least 1,000 times faster than other cryptocurrencies.

Micropayment Support

At current it’s almost impossible to use most established coins to send micropayments. However, Harmon has hinted that this feature would get activated on the Hedera Hashgraph network and it will be possible for one party to pay another a fraction of a penny.

The CEO said he firmly believes that this feature could be very beneficial in the IoT ecosystem, as things would be able to engage in transactions in a micro-economy automatically.

Despite already having a $100 million war chest, Hedera has said it would conduct another crowdsale, to raise $20 million via the sale of its tokens.

The fundraiser will only be available to accredited investors and will be held under a private placement in accordance with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Guidelines.

interesting that all of the roles for this project are in finance & ops, legal, marketing, and sales & biz dev. this team clearly understands how the altcoin market works. https://t.co/BOvu76iUUa — Meltem Demirors (@Melt_Dem) August 2, 2018

As noted by Hedera, the network will go live in September 2018, and some of its partners will have access to the numerous distributed applications on the platform.