Today, public distributed ledger (DLT) Hedera Hashgraph announced that Indian IT giant Wipro is joining its governing council. The Hedera Governing Council aims to have 39 members representing 18 industry sectors. So far there are a dozen members.
Launched six months ago, Hedera is not a blockchain, but a hashgraph focused on enterprise solutions. One of its main advantages it is significantly more scalable than current proof of work blockchains.
Bangalore-based Wipro has a global presence and earned revenues of over $8 billion in 2019. It is the second Indian company to join the governing council, the other being Tata Communications. Other members include Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, FIS, Google, IBM, Magalu, Nomura, Swirlds and Swisscom Blockchain.
“The Hedera Governing Council delivers a governance model that is designed for ongoing decentralization and is considered industry-leading for DLT governance — a status strengthened by the addition of Wipro to the council,” said Mance Harmon, CEO and Co-founder of Hedera Hashgraph.
Although Hedera plans to address 18 sectors with the council, it is currently very tech-heavy. It has three telecoms members with Deutsche Telekom, Tata Communications and Swisscom, and three consultants or cloud companies in Google, IBM, and Wipro. All six offer some type of cloud services, and when Google made its recent announcement of joining the council it was clear that having a cloud partnership was a major attraction.
Hedera is a different type of distributed ledger technology which claims to process tens of thousands of transactions per second. The goal is to tackle issues faced by public blockchains such as performance, security, stability and governance. However, the September network was considered a beta version. Hence, Hedera held back on some of that scalability while the network settled in. For example, while cryptocurrency transactions can go to 10,000 per second, smart contracts are currently limited to 100 per second.
The underlying technology is proprietary and owned by Swirlds.
The governance council monitors the technical development of the network and sets policies for the nodes. Hedera aims to avoid the possibility of a fork by developing this governance model.
Additionally, the council members control the nodes with write permission to the network, which makes dealing with challenges easier to coordinate. It said members could serve on the council for two consecutive three-year terms.
“Wipro joining the Hedera Governing Council highlights our commitment to developers, and a rapidly emerging need for blockchain innovation,” added Harmon.
Hedera has raised $123 million to date.
