Hedera Hashgraph, the much talked about high speed blockchain alternative is now live.

Hedera Hashgraph backed by some of the world’s largest corporations with a  promise of a faster transactions with greater capacity to scale any day any time than any blockchain has finally launched its long-awaited public network. 

Although,  the network had been available under a testing environment using a small group of corporations and developers, Since December 2018.

Now people can open an account or even build a decentralized app (dapp) on the hashgraph as stated as at Tuesday by 00:00 UTC , the dapp which uses  different structures and mechanism to achieve consensus about the state of the ledger which is still similar to a blockchain.

From 01:00 UTC, the Hedera treasury is ready to start the  distribution of the system’s HBAR tokens as the public network has been launched. 
The investors who participated in a $124 million crowd sale that took place in three different times from March 2018 to August 2018 will get the first token worth more than 379 million.

Advisors, vendors and other participants on the first day will receive 1.95 million tokens. Then over the next 15 years, the network’s governing council will release a total balance of 50 billion supply of HBARS. 

The following cryptocurrency exchanges and over-the-counter (OTC) desks has planned to list HBAR for trading: AlgoZ, BitOoda, Bering Waters, Bittrex, Galaxy Digital, GSR, Liquid, OKEx, OKCoin, OSL, Upbit and xFutures, all twelve in number.

A year and a half in the making, the hashgraph stands out from other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) in several ways.
 
Its creators has made claims on it’s efficiency as regards how it works more than blockchains, making it more suitable for enterprises and commerce. 
 
Comparing it to other two major and largest crypto, Hedera specifically, says that the network can support up to 10,000 transactions per second, compared to 2.8 per second and 15  for bitcoin and ethereum respectively.
 
“Globally this is the first situation  hashgraph is being put to test,” Hedera CEO Mance Harmon stated.

Furthermore, “It’s actually a different data structure, different technology though different from blockchain, but solves the same kinds of problems with better security and better performance.”

It’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism considering the way is being structured and how it works is fairer than bitcoin’s proof-of-work, it shows by the way transactions comes, in the order they were recorded and to all settle in the same of time limit.
 
Hedera’s code is not open-source rather it's  patented , in other words, copying of the codebase or forking will not be allowed. This is a condition the network says it will enforce to prevent it.
 
Hedera can boasts of the endorsement  from blue-chip names represented on its governing council, whose members run nodes and vote on software updates, such as  IBM, Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, Tata, Nomura and bank tech vendor FIS .
 
Hedera Hashgraph has gained its share of admirers and critics throughout the movement for the launch.

“Hedera’s size is the key to its speed,” a statement from one of it's  fans, Steve Wilson, a principal analyst at emerging technologies advisory firm Constellation Research.

The hashgraph is smaller since it does not store all transaction history on the ledger (though it can be optionally stored on a “mirror” network) but the regular blockchains are kind of some gigabytes large.

Stating further, Wilson said , the hashgraph promises instant payments and successful transactions conclusions as opposed to around 70 percent of transactions settling every ten minutes for bitcoin and a whole lot of transactions ending inconclusively. An addition to its speed, 

“Hedera is ever commited with a quality of service that others are not committed to.” He added.

Critics

Eric Wall, the former blockchain lead at Nasdaq-owned fintech vendor Cinnober claimed that the speed , however is only applicable to certain kinds of transactions.

Eric Wall, who recently made a few skeptical Medium posts about Hedera stating that a dapp requires smart contracts and since Hedera is currently dangling with ten transactions per second with smart contracts, what difference does it make with Ethereum.
 
Again, Hedera’s consensus service is also nothing new as it just like others taken advantage of the consensus strength of the underlying system and as such, Sidechains have also been created off of public blockchains.

“I can’t predict what Hedera will transition to in the future, but the movement away from a model being  based on economic and game theory guarantees to a trusted model is an ultimate decrease in the neutrality model of the system which is the main uniqueness of it".

Link to private networks

According to Harmon, hundreds of developers since October have been building on the network and presently, 25 are now running dapps that were integrated into the mainnet before to launch.

Notwithstanding, the hashgraph is taken as being  in a testing phase because the network still lacks the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) and a few other features which will be included in version 1.0.

The HCS allows a hash of transactions from another network to be ordered in the Hedera network by time, showing a searchable record of when transactions occurred with the trust of a decentralized network. It as well serves as a link between private blockchain networks and hashgraph.

Take for instance, a drug development and decision-support company, Certara , plans to use the HCS to create “tamper-proof” recording of health data transactions while using a private network like Hyperledger Fabric to ensure privacy, according to the vice president of technology and innovation at Certara subsidiary Synchrogenix, Jim Nasr. 

Additionally, the HCS will also allow Fabric to run on top of mirror nodes that gives insight into all the transactions flowing over the hashgraph but do not participate in the consensus mechanism like a regular node.

 Nasr said. “Getting the computation done in the right pattern and trusted way is why you want to go down the blockchain path for healthcare,” Transactions can still leverage a private blockchain even though with consensus services.”
 

Credits:  Niklesh Dee, Tom Hill.