Hedera Hashgraph to Launch Public Mainnet on September 16th

Decentralized public network Hedera Hashgraph announced the addition of a huge United States financial company to its already strong governing council, among other interesting news.

Yesterday the blockchain-like public network for enterprises announced that the next addition to their 39-member council is FIS Global. A blog post from their official website reported that Hedera is also planning to launch their public mainnet on September 16^th.

Hedera Hashgraph believes its ledger technology will help enhance distributed file storage and micropayments. It will also support smart contracts and allow private networks to connect to public ones, leveraging all the benefits from their particular transaction ordering mechanism. Hedera reports that at launch they will support up to 10,000 transactions per second. File services will be performed at 10 transactions per second.

Hedera Hashgraph’s council members already include companies from various industries that spread between four continents. The U.S.-based financial services provider FIS Global joins the prominent company of big names like American technology giant IBM, Japan’s Nomura Holdings and the Indian Tata Communications.

Leemon Baird, the person who invented the hashgraph consensus algorithm, commented on the diversity in their council board:

“We wanted to make sure that those initial members were diverse enough. They’re on different continents, under different governments and in different industries.”

Hedera will decentralize its governance even more with the addition of FIS, but it seems that this is not enough for their vision. CEO of Hedera, Mance Harmon noted on their intentions:

“We started with what we think are the low-hanging fruit, but there’s a large swath of the market we have not begun to touch… For instance, we don’t have anyone in the energy sector or the automobile industry.”

Along with the launch of the mainnet, Hedera will begin to distribute their HBAR tokens and will continue to do so for the next 15 years(but in periods). Until now, after three rounds of funding via SAFTs (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) they’ve raised $124 million. The 1,000 participants in these SAFT rounds will get their hands on the first HBAR tokens.

Hedera is acting clever against possible monopolization of the HBAR market and nodes, and will release HBAR in tranches over a certain period of time.

A 10^th governing member will be announced before the launch of the mainnet and, as Hedera noted, the open system will be ran by 13 nodes. Three of the 10 governing members will actually run two nodes in the beginning since it is a safer approach, but in the future all members will run only one node.