Building Hedera Hashgraph and advancing DLT beyond blockchain
The arrival of Bitcoin in 2009 sparked a revolution. It introduced to the world a new way of exchanging value, an electronic cash system designed to address the flaws in the established financial system. It also gave birth to one of the fastest growing technology fields today – blockchain and the broader sector of distributed ledger technologies (DLT).
While pioneering, thе early Blockchain technology had limitations, such as scalability and high latency that have become apparent over the years since Bitcoin’s inception. Many blockchain projects have been working on solving those issues, but the DLT landscape has been expanding in other directions, too. One of the most prominent projects seeking to expand DLT beyond blockchain is Hedera Hashgraph.
Blockchain 2.0
The origin of Hedera Hashgraph can be traced back to 2015-2016 and the invention of the hashgraph protocol by Dr. Leemon Baird. Notably, Dr. Baird’s involvement in the blockchain space came as a result of his desire to create a better way to do distributed consensus. His efforts led to the invention of the hashgraph protocol, which leveraged directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to achieve superior speed, scalability, fair ordering of transactions, and asynchronous byzantine fault tolerance (ABFT) security compared to traditional blockchain protocols.
In the following years, the project was substantially expanded through the launches of the Hedera distributed ledger and the Hedera Governing Council, a set of term-limited organizations that own, operate, and govern the network, which today counts Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Boeing and LG Electronics among its members.
Bringing LimeChain on board
With the scope of the project growing rapidly, Hedera needed leading blockchain developers capable of building world-class software applications on the protocol. LimeChain stood out from the crowd with an impressive record of completed blockchain projects and a highly experienced development team. After a promising initial meeting with LimeChain experts, Hedera eventually found an opportunity to bring the experienced team as an external technology partner and open source contributor.
“We were just particularly impressed in terms of the experience and the scope of experience in the work that had been done to date,” says Nigel Clark, SVP, Partners & Industries. “The LimeChain team had worked extensively on Ethereum, Baseline and other blockchain networks such as Polkadot, and we always wanted to do some work together.”
The opportunity for collaboration first came when Hedera agreed to an open source demo on how the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) could be utilized to integrate existing corporate systems together for a supply chain use case – in this case Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Google Sheets. The demo was put together by the LimeChain team, which impressed with their ability to deliver a quality product in a timely manner. LimeChain were later offered to become an open source contributor for core Hedera services functionality.
After a series of follow-up conversations, and going through the Hedera roadmap process, Hedera approved to entrust LimeChain with helming development of the Hedera Token Service. During development, the team demonstrated its deep understanding of the technical side of the project and was able to quickly gain ground thanks to efficient processes and project management. LimeChain will continue to participate in upcoming Hedera open source contribution opportunities.
The future
Having found a trusty and capable development and client delivery partner, Hedera is determined to continue expanding its technology and help reshape the DLT landscape. The results so far have been extremely promising.
“The number of transactions that are done on the Hedera network in such a short period of time is quite remarkable for the space,” says Zenobia Godschalk, SVP, Corporate Communications at Hedera. “The kinds of applications that are getting built on top of this are really meaningful,” including applications that track specific populations at schools and universities and help manage Covid-19 outbreaks.
With public and private organizations increasingly warming up to the idea of using distributed ledger technologies, the demand for DLT solutions capable of operating at scale is poised to grow. And with its unconventional approach, Hedera is shaping up to be one of the prime candidates to address that demand.