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IBM and Indian telecom firm Tata Communications have joined the governing council of Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed ledger platform for enterprises.
As per a news release, the platform said that the addition of the two firms is a powerful endorsement of its hashgraph consensus mechanism.
“Our governance models, which includes a robust system of checks and balances, ensures power can’t be consolidated, while at the same time providing a stable and scalable platform on which developers can build,” Mance Harmon, Hedera Hashgraph CEO, said.
The council, which aims to ensure decentralized and responsible management for a next-generation DLT platform, will consist of up to 39 multinational entities from different industries. By far, eight slots have been filled by other governing members including Japanese financial holding firm Nomura, Deutsche Telekom, and law firm DLA Piper.
All council members will have equal rights in approving updates to the Hedera platform codebase and in implementing policies for the nodes that will comprise Hedera’s decentralized network.
“The members of the governing council are the actual owners of the company. They aren’t just advisers. They are Hedera,” Leemon Baird, the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, told Reuters. “Hedera is an LLC (limited liability company) that is split 39 ways – 39 companies own it, control it, and make all the decision.”
However, council members can only serve a maximum of two consecutive three-year terms and act as stewards of the platform.
Hedera is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) firm that is establishing systems that work differently than existing blockchains. It can facilitate micropayments and distributed file storage, support smart contracts, and eventually enable private networks to plug into the public one to take advantage of its transaction ordering mechanism.
The latest move makes IBM the first major tech firm and Tata Communications the first Indian company to join the network.
“Innovations such as DLT, AI, and IoT change the way organizations and people interact with each other and with the world. These emerging technologies can be harnessed to strengthen our efforts to improve operational efficiencies and enable our customers’ digital transformation worldwide,” Ankur Jindal, Tata Communications Global Head of Corporate Venturing and Innovation, said.
The announcement follows after IBM recently filed a blockchain-based web browser patent in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. As per the filing, the system “records and maintains a record of browser events in a blockchain using a peer-to-peer network.”
