By
Bena Ilyas
April 17th, 2024
After months of testing, the Hedera Hashgraph has finally launched its public network which promises to have unmatched speed in the entire distributed ledger space. Hedera has also begun the distribution of its native HBAR tokens.
Hedera Hashgraph has finally launched its highly anticipated public mainnet after more than a few months of testing which began with a closed group in December 2018. The network is backed by more than a few major institutions and purports to deliver high scalability and much faster transaction speed that will easily dwarf any blockchains currently available.
Now that the public mainnet has finally been launched, pretty much anyone has access to creating a profile and also developing their own decentralized app (DAPP).
Hedera is a hashgraph which is a bit like blockchain but has a different framework used to arrive at its ledger consensus. This newly launched beta is advertised to attain a network speed of up to 10,000 transactions per second as a start, as Hedera promises to scale even higher than this before the end of the year as a way to improve the network’s security.
To put this in perspective, Ethereum which is one of the most widely used blockchains, can handle an average of 15 transactions a second, still less than 1% of the Hedera figure.
The Hedera Hashgraph speed is achievable because it adopts a system dubbed Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). This system works inversely from other networks because while others, like Ethereum, seem to get bloated and slow down when there are too many transactions, the DAG allows the Hedera Hashgraph network to pick up speed and verify these transactions a lot faster. Developers will also be able to use the Hedera Hashgraph for a smart contract as well as file storage. However, the activity here will only run at 10 transactions per second.
Furthermore, the network’s native asset dubbed HBAR token is already being distributed by the Hedera treasury. Last year between March and August, Hedera held three rounds of a crowd sale, successfully raising $124 million. The treasury will begin the first phase of a total 50 billion HBAR token distribution by supplying these investors with at least 379 million tokens.
There will also be further 1.95 million tokens what will be distributed to several participants including advisors and vendors. After these, the rest of the supply will then be periodically released for about 15 years. Hedera Hashgraph trading has started on UpBit and it’s now trading at ~3.4x in USD from the highest price in the accredited investor round ($0.12).
Also the HBAR tokens will be listed for trading by at least 12 over-the-counter (OTC) and crypto platforms. They include xFutures, AlgoZ, Bering Waters, Bittrex, Galaxy Digital, BitOoda, OKEx, Liquid, OSL, OKCoin, and GSR.
The Hedera Hashgraph network is already recording some progress as according to a recent press release, the fiat to crypto Carbon firm has announced that it has already launched a dollar-backed stablecoin on the Hedera network. Called the CarbonUSD (CUSD), the new stablecoin will enjoy all of the benefits of the Hedera Network including fast settlement and on-boarding.
To fund the Hedera platform’s development and the network’s initial operations, Hedera accepted investments in the
form of Simple Agreements for Future Tokens (“SAFTs”).
As the project’s coin economics paper reads “overall, Hedera raised $124 million via SAFTs. The SAFTs were offered at a fixed price per token, not a discount to a future sale price. The initial two rounds of SAFTs have long release schedules of three to four years, while the final SAFT round offered a choice between a four-year release schedule and an eight-month release schedule. The first two SAFT seed rounds were at a price of close to zero dollars. The third SAFT was available with two pricing options and different release schedules, either 12 cents for a release schedule over 8 months or 9.6 cents for a 4-year release.”
Coinsquad, a cryptocurrency service provider, also announced the expansion of its service, including its desktop and mobile technical support software, to the Hedera Hashgraph. Coinsquad now promises better efficiency and support for remote management of cryptocurrency and distributed ledger technologies.
25 DApps have now gone live with the Hedera network. Some of them include blockchain explorer Hash.hash.info, decentralized advertising platform AdsDax, as well as Certara, healthcare-focused analysis platform.