When Hedera Hashgraph launched, it was one of the only public distributed ledger networks that used proprietary code. That’s about to change. The consensus algorithm was developed by Leemon Baird at Swirlds, which retained the rights to the intellectual property. Today Hedera announced that the Governing Council voted to acquire the IP from Swirlds. And it intends to open source the code. It didn’t share the amount paid.
We’ve asked if there’s additional intellectual property to which Swirlds retains rights but didn’t receive a response in time for publication. However, based on the company’s website, we believe the consensus algorithm was the main proprietary piece. Hedera is a Hashgraph which is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) but not a blockchain.
Hedera’s Governing Council consists of 25 substantial organizations, including the likes of Google, IBM, Nomura and Boeing. As such, it’s a public network in which anybody can participate, but only the Governing Council nodes have permission to write data to the network. This helps prevent forks in the network and means it’s not entirely permissionless.
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