Overview

As a first-generation blockchain, Bitcoin brought a revolution to the digital world. Later, Ethereum arrived with smart contract functionality and it gained huge traction from enterprises and developers. However, both these blockchains had some weak points. For example, Bitcoin failed to provide a decentralized infrastructure to support dApp development. Ethereum lacks scalability and low-cost development.

Hedera, being a third-generation blockchain protocol, aims to solve the problem of heavy bandwidth consumption of blockchain protocols, offering a highly scalable and secure infrastructure for seamless dApp development. Hedera further stands out with its licensing and truly decentralized governance model that strives to maintain the integrity of its network by allowing the governing members to participate in voting and decision-making activities equally.

About Hedera

Hedera is a fully open-source public blockchain network designed to support the development and deployment of dApps and microservices. The network’s mainnet was officially launched in August 2018, with Hedera Hashgraph token-HBAR being its native token. Developers can utilize the fast, fair and highly-efficient Herera’s ecosystem to build customized decentralized applications and permissioned blockchain networks to run their separate consensus algorithms and rulesets.

Hedera’s Architecture

The architecture of Hedera consists of three layers; the internet layer, Hashgraph consensus layer, and services layer.

• The first layer-internet layer represents Hedera’s network of computers that validate and preserve the blockchain data. 
• The consensus layer helps the nodes keep an identical consensus for every shard. 
• The services layer represents cryptos, file storage, smart contracts 2.0 and consensus.

Also, Hedera includes the Mirror network and Sharding technique in its architecture. While the Mirror network works as a “read-only” node, it lowers the load on the main network, helping it functions more efficiently. With Sharding, Hedera separates the whole network into smaller groups of nodes for their efficient and easy management. 

Consensus mechanism of Hedera

Hedera uses the Hashgraph consensus mechanism, which strives to provide a new infrastructure for a distributed consensus. It allows users to agree on an agreement in the same order that other users have adopted to generate transactions. Hashgraph consensus enables the Hedera network to achieve high performance while reducing the overall cost of building dApps and transaction execution.

Key features of Hedera

Fast

Hedera achieves high speed and low latency to complete the transaction in seconds, requiring less computing resources than most blockchains.

Fair

With fair access, a reliable time stamping approach, and transaction order, Hedera avoids malicious node attempts for data manipulation.

Scalable

With the ability to process 10,000+ transactions, Hedera offers high scalability on the network with block finality in seconds.

Secure

Hedera’s network offers best-in-class security asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant (ABFT) and is highly resistant against DDoS and Sybil attacks.

Stable

Governed and managed by many global entities, Hedera ensures reliability to avoid forking and meet global standards for data regulations and compliance.

Popular use cases of Hedera

Payments

Leverage the benefit of cost-efficient and real-time payments by issuing stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies on the Hedera ecosystem.

Asset tokenization

Quickly configure, mint and manage a variety of fungible and non-fungible tokens on the Hedera ecosystem without using smart contracts.

Custom blockchains

Easily create custom permission blockchain while powering the chains with attributes like trust and open-source for mass adoption.

Founders

Leemon Baird and his business partner, Mance Harmon, are the founders of Hedera.

Mance has 20+ years of experience serving various senior-level roles across enterprises and startups.

Baird is the co-founder and CTO of Swirlds Inc. He has been a professor of computer science at several reputed universities, possessing over 20 years of total experience.