Deutsche Telekom, Nomura Holdings and others join blockchain startup Hedera Hashgraph’s governing council

Hedera Hashgraph, a public distributed ledger for building decentralized applications, has announced the initial members of the Hedera Hashgraph Council.

The Hedera Hashgraph Council will govern changes to the software run by millions of Hedera distributed nodes over time. It will bring stability and guaranteed continued decentralization to the Hedera Hashgraph distributed public ledger.

The initial members represent some of the most respected names in the telecommunications, technology, financial services, legal, and retail industries globally. This includes Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, Magazine Luiza, Nomura Holdings, and Swisscom Blockchain AG.

“Hedera's governing members will provide the technical expertise to manage the technical roadmap, business expertise to manage business operations, expertise in economics and currency markets to manage the cryptocurrency, and legal expertise to help navigate the evolving regulatory environment,” Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera, said.

“With the Hedera Hashgraph Council, you are seeing a true distributed governance model finally come to fruition, and we could not be more excited about this first group of council members.”

Hedera explained that it does not require mining or proof of work and plans to address ongoing decentralization concerns by separating governance from consensus. Based on the original model used by National BankAmericard, the governance model is designed in a way that ensures the governing council can be trusted to do what’s in the best interest of the Hedera network, that no single company has control, and that the Council cannot be unduly influenced by individual members or node operators.

In its official release, Hedera said that it will use a combination of technical and legal controls to give the governing council mechanisms to promote stability and ensure the network will never fork. The consensus model ensures that the Hedera network will expand to millions of nodes voting on the order of transactions in a highly distributed network.

The organization also announced a livestream of its first annual summit, being held on February 20th in Seoul, Korea.