Nigel Clark on Hedera: “If you built the Internet today, you’d build a trust layer.”

Frederik Bussler
Nov 1 · 2 min read

From October 30th to November 1st, hundreds of blockchain professionals from industry and academia are joining forces in Athens, Greece at Decentralized 2019 to engage in workshops, talks, and networking. One prominent keynote speaker was Nigel Clark, whose talk was titled Who do you Trust to Create the Trust Layer of the New Internet?, representing Hedera Hashgraph.

Giving a background on Hedera, Nigel had this to say:

“We focus on building the trust layer of the Internet. On the 16th of September this year, Hedera Hashgraph launched to the world. The Hedera Governing Council gave permission to launch. Anyone can start building distributed systems today and build a trusted, secure future for us all.”

Trust is the theme of what Hedera Hashgraph is enabling:

“We’ve spoken a lot about the break down of trust. If you built the Internet today, you’d build a trust layer. You would build a layer on Hedera Hashgraph to allow a regulator to prove you own an asset. Lots of organizations are building on Hedera: for real-time payments, asset provenance, and so on.

When we founded Hedera, we thought about how to create a secure, trusted future. There’s gotta be really high performance. You need best-in-class security.

It needs real stability, it cannot fork if enterprises adopt DLT at scale. We are not a blockchain. If they’re going to adopt this tech at scale it must be stable, it must not fork. It must be secure, it must perform at lightning speed.”

To ensure that the platform can be trusted, it must be secure, high performance, and fast, but there’s also more:

“Fundamentally, it must also be governed.

I work for the Governing Council. Libra validated what we’re doing.

A Governing Council provides trust and stability. Hedera’s vision is to form this governing council with up to 39 leading organizations across 18 industries across all continents. The members can only serve 2 three-year terms.

Right now, we have some fantastic organizations on the council driving the network. One of the leaders in hyperledger, IBM, has joined the council. People can build the trust of a private network onto a public network.”

The Governing Council helps to ensure trust and that there’s no centralized authority or control. But, let’s conclude with some thoughts on Hedera’s “blockchain:”

“Hedera Hashgraph is the third generation of blockchain, currently in the beta stage. Thousandths of a cent per transaction, stable, secure, governed, trust layer for you to build on.

Hedera Hashgraph is not a blockchain, we’re a Directed Acyclic Graph. Hedera has some incredible technology, we’re Proof of Stake with virtual voting, gossip, and ABFT. We don’t require heavy electricity usage. Completely decentralized and running very fast. The next evolution of the whole distributed ledger world.”

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