Hedera Hashgraph derives its name from an algorithm. It is based on the “hashgraph consensus” technology that gets around the big trade-off related to blockchain, the fundamental technology behind cryptocurrency. Blockchain can be fast but unsecure, or secure and slow. Hedera Hashgraph aims to build a fast and secure blockchain alternative.
This is not a riveting topic for many people, but it may surprise you to learn the company has just raised $100 million. It raised the money via a future token sale from institutional investors, and Hedera will use the money to create a new commerce network based on its “hashgraph consensus” technology.
Mance Harmon, CEO of the Dallas, Texas-based company, will use the money to build out the Hashgraph network and set up a micropayment system that uses the core tech. Put simply, the company hopes to disrupt the world’s financial systems, Harmon said in an interview with VentureBeat this week.
“As a technology, it’s a fundamental advance in the world of distributed systems,” Harmon said in an interview with VentureBeat. “It has fantastic performance, and it achieves the best in security one can have in the field.”
He added, “Small systems have achieved this in the past, but never at scale. Bitcoin had terrible performance, but it is reasonably secure. It was always a trade-off. What hashgraph does for the first time is break that trade-off, maximizing both security and performance.”
I was fascinated by the story Harmon told me about how the hashgraph technology could one day be used to handle millions of transactions per second in a secure way.