Hedera Hashgraph, a public distributed ledger platform for building decentralized applications, announced on Monday that IBM and Tata Communications have joined the Hedera Governing Council. The Council, as the company says is “designed to ensure decentralized and responsible governance for a next-generation Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform.” Thirty-nine multinational companies and firms will be a part of the Council.
The Council members will serve for 3-year terms, with a maximum of 2 consecutive terms, and have an equal say in all decisions regarding Hedera’s decentralized policies and approval of Hedera platform codebase updates.
“The addition of IBM and Tata Communications to the Hedera Governing Council is a powerful endorsement of the hashgraph consensus mechanism, and further decentralizes the governance of Hedera Hashgraph. Our governance model, 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,” said Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera Hashgraph in a press release.
Tata Communications which is based in Pune, India, has a market cap of $1.9 billion and is a digital infrastructure provider. Tata Communications has its presence in over 200 countries. Whereas, IBM is a multi-technology enterprise and an enterprise blockchain provider. IBM has a market cap of $120 billion.
The Hedera Governing Council consists of enterprises from diverse sectors like telecommunications, technology, financial services, law, and retail sectors. Magalu, Swisscom Blockchain, Nomura, Swirlds, Deutsche Telekom and DLA Piper among others are members of the Council.
Ankur Jindal, Global Head of Corporate Venturing and Innovation at Tata Communications, said, “We look forward to engaging with other forward-looking businesses on the Hedera Hashgraph Governing Council to help deliver the potential of DLT to the wider digital economy.”
“We believe Hedera could help provide an interesting way to enhance and simplify the deployment of Hyperledger Fabric in the enterprise, making it easier for groups to build and grow their networks,” said Jerry Cuomo, Vice President of Blockchain Technologies at IBM, remarking the Hyperledger (which is an open-source collaborative endeavor created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies).
Hedera Hashgraph, founded in 2018, has thirteen investors including ICONIUM, BlockTower Capital and Digital Currency Group among others. According to CrunchBase, the company has raised $118 million in funding in over 5 rounds.
