Hedera Governing Council votes to open source hashgraph IP
January 20, 2022
The UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies (UCL CBT) is proud to announce the latest decision of the Hedera Governing Council. Hedera is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) network that stands out for its groundbreaking hashgraph technology, a singularly efficient and secure consensus algorithm that enables the ledger to achieve very high throughput. Yesterday, the Hedera Governing Council announced that it will purchase the intellectual property rights from the founding member Swirlds.
With this purchase, the Hedera Governing Council will move to lift the patent protecting the hashgraph consensus algorithm. The Council has thus committed to make hashgraph open source (currently “open review“) under Apache 2.0 license in 2022.
Hedera is already on its way from being a “public permissioned” DLT to a “public permissionless” DLT, and has already grown from the five original Council members to twenty-five at present. When the Governing Council reaches thirty-nine members, Hedera will move toward fully permissionless. In this context, and with the Hedera codebase and developer ecosystem tools already being open source, the open-sourcing of hashgraph constitutes a very important milestone in Hedera’s path to decentralisation.
In 2020, UCL became the first university to join the Hedera Governing Council, in support of its decentralised governance model. Today, in a Council twice as large as back then, UCL CBT is satisfied to see this vision realising, having voted in favour of this decision.
The open-sourcing of the hashgraph consensus layer will benefit the growth of a healthy developer ecosystem and the adoption of the algorithm itself. The Council also announced that the network code will be out of beta with the next MainNet upgrade, which will enhance the usefulness of the network for enterprise use cases.
Dr. Paolo Tasca, Executive Director of UCL CBT, stated:
“Under high uncertainty and growing complexity economies, knowledge- and technology-intensive industries can maintain sustainable growth only by promoting open models of highly interactive and collaborative, multidisciplinary and multidirectional innovation. Innovation ecosystems are generally difficult to build because they are characterized by open non-linear dynamics, high receptivity to feedback loops, and persistent structural transformations. I believe in non-hierarchical governance models which enable self-adaptability to rapid change via multilateral cooperation between innovators, developers, industry and academia. Therefore, I praise the Hedera team for their majestic work towards the broadening of the Hedera innovation ecosystem through open-sourcing the consensus layer and further governance decentralization.”
Read Hedera’s official press release at https://hedera.com/blog/leading-research-institution-university-college-london-joins-hedera-governing-council-as-first-higher-education-member
About Hedera
Hedera Hashgraph is a public distributed ledger for building decentralized applications. Developers can build secure, fair, blazing-fast decentralized applications on top of the Hedera platform. Dr. Leemon Baird, Hedera Hashgraph Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, and Mance Harmon, Co-founder and CEO of Hedera, patented the groundbreaking hashgraph technology after working together at the United States Air Force Academy and as founders of Trio Security, BlueWave Security, and Swirlds, Inc.
For more information, visit https://www.hedera.com, or follow us on Twitter at @hashgraph, Telegram at t.me/hashgraph, or Discord at https://www.hedera.com/discord. The Hedera whitepaper can be found at https://www.hedera.com/whitepaper.
About the University College London Centre for Blockchain Technologies
Founded in 1826 in the heart of London, UCL is London’s leading multidisciplinary university, with more than 13,000 staff and 42,000 students from 150 different countries. Ranked 8th in the world by QS World University Rankings in 2022, University College London is amongst the best universities in the world. In the most recent Research Excellence Framework, UCL was the top-rated university in the UK for research strength.
In 2016, UCL launched the Centre for Blockchain Technologies (UCL CBT), dedicated to researching the effects of DLT on socio-economic systems and to promoting the adoption of blockchain technology. The centre is one of the largest in the world, and serves as the nucleus for DLT and blockchain research and engagement across 8 different departments and over 250 researchers and practitioners from UCL, other academic institutions and companies.