Hedera Hashgraph Network Expands From 16 to 18 Nodes

According to the company’s announcement, the addition of new nodes is the essential aspect of Hedera’s path towards full decentralization. eftpos, an Australian company providing payment solutions for merchants, joined the Hedera Governing Council on 27 January, while the Standard Bank joined the council on 24 February. The council consists of 39 international companies from a variety of industries and includes the likes of Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, Google, IBM, LG, and UCL.

Both companies have also joined the Technology, Regulatory, Marketing, and Coin committees on the Council.

The Standard Bank’s network node will temporarily be deployed in a physical data center hosted by MassiveGrid in New York. Once all necessary regulatory approval is obtained, the node will be migrated to a data center in South Africa with full ownership of the node transitioning to the Standard Bank.

eftpos will have its network node deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Oregon. The company’s node will be temporary as well, as it’s set to be replaced by one operated in Australia by eftpos’ technical team following initial testing.

During this period, the temporary Zain Group node will also migrate to Zain Group’s on-premises data center. The node will be under complete control of the Zain Group’s IT teams. The Kuwaiti telecoms firm joined the Hedera Governing Council in June 2020, becoming the first company from the Middle East to do so.

In its blog post, Hedera explained that while all of its nodes are currently run by Hedera Governing Council members, eventually anyone will be able to run a node and contribute to the network consensus.