Blockchain adoption has not even reached any significant level till now, but a project claiming to be its alternative is already out. Hedera Hashgraph, which was under development for more than a year, is now live on mainnet. It’s proclaiming that it can serve all the purposes of blockchain without bringing their limitations into the picture.

Here’s how Hedera CEO Mance Harmon puts it:

“It’s a different data structure, different technology and looks nothing like a blockchain, but solves the same kinds of problems with better security and better performance.”

But what exactly is this project and in which ways it’s better than blockchains? More importantly, is it indeed as good as its CEO and supporters are claiming? Let’s find out:

Speed: The main feature of Hashgraph

The key highlight of Hedera Hashgraph is its speed. It boasts of the ability to process 10,000 transactions per second, which is way more than the processing capacity of other major blockchain networks. Ethereum, for example, processes only 15 transactions per second, and Bitcoin a mere 2.8 transactions per second.

HBAR: The Hedera Token

Hedera’s HBAR tokens are also out now. The first batch of 379 million tokens has gone to the investors of project who participated in its $124 million crowd sale between March-August last year. Second batch of 1.95 million tokens will go to the advisors, vendors and other participants who helped in making Hedera a reality. The remaining supply of more than 50 billion tokens will be released to the users over next 15 years.

Hedera has also been successful in giving a wide market to its HBAR tokens. Twelve exchanges have decided to list them, which include: OKEx, OKCoin, AlgoZ, Bittrex, Upbit, xFutures, Bering Waters, BitOoda, Galaxy Digital, GSR, Liquid, and OSL.

Patented code

Another way how Hedera differs from blockchains is that its code is patented – not open source! And they plan to keep it that way because they believe it can help in protecting the network from forking and copying of database.

Hedera Governing Council

Hedera Hashgraph is managed by a Governing Council, which consists of many bigwigs. No other blockchain management body comes anywhere close to the strength of its members (except Libra). Hedera Governing Council includes IBM, Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, Nomura, Tata, and FIS.

The catch

Till now everything looks fantastic. However, some shortcomings also exist in this blockchain alternative. Eric Wall, former blockchain lead at Nasdaq-owned Fintech firm Cinnober, wrote a series of skeptical posts about Hedera Hashgraph on Medium .

According to him, the eye-popping speed of 10,000 tps is not available to all transactions. The project is limiting transaction speed to 10 tps only for smart contract transactions, which is less than the speed of Ethereum.

Secondly, some features of the project are also not available right now. For instance, the Hedera Consensus Services (HCS), which will act as a bridge between Hedera Hashgraph and other blockchains, is not available at the moment. It will be available in version 1.0, which gives us a feeling that this is not a full-fledged mainnet. A beta mainnet seems more appropriate term.

Can it race ahead of blockchains?

It will be interesting to see. It’s not an easy task to take on huge blockchain networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, TRON and Binance Chain which are already having thousands of projects working on them.

And even if Hedera Hashgraph manages to race ahead of them, its skeptics are suggesting that it’s not as different from a blockchain as it’s being promoted. Eric Wall says that a number of features that form its foundation, including sidechains utilizing the strength of public blockchains, have already existed for a long time.

Nevertheless, it’ll be interesting to see how well Hedera Hashgraph is adopted in the world.