Hedera claims its flavor of distributed ledger technology (DLT) can facilitate micropayments and distributed file storage, support smart contracts.
It will eventually allow private networks to plug into the public one to take advantage of its transaction ordering mechanism. After three rounds of funding done through simple agreements for future tokens (SAFTs), Hedera has raised $124 million.
IBM is the first major tech company, and Tata is the first Indian company to join the network. Some of the networks other governing members include Japanese financial holding company Nomura, Deutsche Telekom and law firm DLA Piper.
At this point in the networks lifecycle, council members are invited by Hedera to join and given fee income for running nodes.
Public-private partnership
IBM said it is most interested in how the public network interacts with private networks. Bryan Gross, principal offering manager of the IBM Blockchain developers platform, said that the most exciting part is the proposed Hedera Consensus Service.
He also added that it has the potential to provide the core innovation of proof-of-work blockchains like bitcoin and Ethereum. It can give the invention without the performance and privacy trade-offs that are typically associated with these networks.
The Hedera Hashgraph is designed to unify public and private networks. For this reason, IBM will use it to build trust in custom Hyperledger Fabric networks.
Big Blue contributed the Fabric platform to Hyperledger, an umbrella project for enterprise blockchains.
Harmon said that Hedera Consensus Service makes it possible for Hyperledger projects out there to use the service to put transactions in order.
It also enables them to eliminate the need for them to stand up nodes for transaction ordering. Additionally, they get the trust model of a public network.
Tata Communications, part of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group also made some comments. It said in a press release that it plans to use distributed ledger technology to improve operational efficiency.
Checks and balances
Harmon commented by saying that the addition of the two significant firms will further decentralize Hederas governance.
Governance includes a system of checks and balances. They are supposed to prevent power from being consolidated at the network. Members of the council have an equal say in approving updates to Hederas codebase and in setting policies for the networks nodes.
Council members can serve a maximum of two consecutive three-year terms if two-thirds of the council agrees to let them continue.
Hederas source code is open for review but patented and is intended to prevent forks. Summa co-founder James Prestwich wants to bridge the great divide between bitcoin and Ethereum.
Now his firm is seeking to find a Blockchain developer and teaming up with fellow blockchain startup Keep. The move is to launch the Cross-Chain Working Group, which aims to create a protocol for using bitcoin on Ethereum-based systems.
The group hosted its first meeting with more than 40 participants, including curious representatives from interoperability protocol Cosmos and Ripples investment arm, Xpring.
Prestwich told CoinDesk explained that the goal was to provide a platform for developers, other than those employed by a base chain, who work across chains. He confirmed that nearly ten different companies have applied to join this group. It makes tools for developers to work across as the best Blockchain developers.
However, the official membership is yet to be determined.
Matt Luongo, CEO of Keeps parent company, Thesis, told CoinDesk that it is a wrapper but a fully decentralized wrapper.
He called it a new sidechain mechanism. It gives you a trustless peg, a supply peg, between the two chains.
Briefly, the bitcoin got deposited with a smart contract that requires multiple signatures to unlock funds. In the meantime, the depositor mostly is given a crypto equivalent of Ethereum-compatible tokens that represent the bitcoin, called tBTC.
It takes a village
Thesis investor Charlie Noyes of Paradigm told CoinDesk tBTC represents a meaningful improvement. It is over previous efforts to make bitcoin more extensible.
It will get done without compromising on security or decentralized ethos. The working groups goal is to launch an Ethereum-based tester app with access to bitcoin this fall and a tBTC main net by Q4.
Keep investor Olaf Carlson-Wee of Polychain Capital told CoinDesk he sees this protocol as critical infrastructure for the broader ecosystem.
Carlson-Wee said that instead of different blockchains getting siloed, they would be able to communicate and interact with one another.
It will form the first step toward that inevitable future. Luongo concluded that they want other folks to have the chance to come in, contribute, and help launch with them. He was speaking of the motivation behind the formation of this group to make tBTCl, instead of both startups doing it proprietarily
Ethereum core developers finalized a list of six different code changes to get activated for Ethereums next system-wide upgrade, Istanbul.
As agreed in prior meetings, Istanbul will get executed in two parts. The first will feature all six code changes or Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs). It is tentatively expected to perform on Ethereum main net this October.
The second became scheduled for mainnet activation sometime in the first quarter of next year. It will feature EIPs requiring further testing and deliberation from core developers. Those include a proposed mining algorithm change called "ProgPoW."
Speaking of the two-part structure of the Istanbul upgrade, core developer Péter Szilágyi said that they split Istanbul into two.
Developers behind major Ethereum clients such as Geth and Parity now have exactly one week to integrate the newly affirmed list of six EIPs into their software. They also have to prepare to implement the full code on a live ethereum test network.
