Will blockchain be made obsolete by Hashgraph?
By: Crypto Unveil
Tags: Technology, Blockchain Interviews, Iota, Bitcoin, Blockchain

Today, I have interviewed the Swirlds team on Hashgraph and their future projects. Swirlds is developing the “next-generation blockchain”: Hashgraph, a data structure and consensus algorithm that is fast, secure, & fair.

1)What problem are you solving and what are the main pillars that define Hashgraph and differentiate you from your competitors?

Hashgraph is a consensus algorythm that allows a community of nodes that may not fully (or at all) trust each other to nevertheless be able to come to agreement on the order of some set of transactions, and so establish a consistent shared state reflecting those transactions. Hashgraph is fast (100k tps with seconds of consensus latency), fair (no one actor unilaterally decides which transactions are added or in what order) and secure (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant) — a combination of features that no other consensus algorythm provides.

2) What differentiate Hashgraph from other distributed ledger technologies? What are his pros and cons?

Hashgraph relies on two unique features that together enable its speed, fairness and security. Gossip, hashgraph has nodes sharing transactions amongst themselves (as in many other consensus models) but also includes information on, from which node they previously learned of those transactions. This small additional piece of information allows all nodes to independently build up a history of the messages sent between the nodes, the hashgraph. Nodes can then independently examine their copy of the hashgraph and vote on what timestamps to assign to the transactions. Critically, because the process does not require any additional messages be sent across the network, it is virtual voting.

3) What value are you adding to your industry value chain and which are the main obstacles to the success of your solution?

Hashgraph’s features will make viable existing use cases, or enable new ones:

hashgraph speed in throughout & latency will make viable payments (theoretically that which Bitcoin was meant to enable). Additionally, because no specialized hardware is required to run it, we expect the fees will be very low, enabling micropayments , eg paying .1 of a cent to read a single news article rather than paying $5 for a monthly subscription.

, eg paying .1 of a cent to read a single news article rather than paying $5 for a monthly subscription. hashgraph fairness will enable markets, auctions, etc, or more generally any use case where buyers & sellers of some resource must be matched.

4) Hashgraph has a patent and it is not open source. Why this is the case and how will you overcome this centralization issue?

The patent and associated license will be used as defensive tools to prevent the Hedera public ledger from forking — with the consequent confusion, uncertainty, and instability (as seen in the current coins and platforms). Swirlds, the owner of the patent, will grant a sole, irrevocable license to Hedera to use the hashgraph algorythm for a public ledger. While the license and certain technical controls will limit forking, the code will be open review, allowing any party to examine it, validate it, and confirm there are no inappropriate functionality.

5) How will your token function within the platform and why is it needed?

Any public ledger requires some scarce resource to protect against Sybil attacks in which a malicious attack creates multiple consensus nodes in order to prevent or skew consensus. The Hedera public ledger uses the native tokens of the platform that nodes have (their stake) to weight their votes in the consensus determination, and so mitigate the risk of Sybil because the attackers stake (and so influence) would be necessarily shared amongst their nodes. Additionally, nodes participating in consensus (and so bearing costs in bandwidth, CPU, and storage) will be compensated with a payment model funded by fees collected from the users of the platform.

6) Thinking about the future, what are your plans for this year? Are you afraid that the volatility of the cryptocurrency market might affect the economy of your project in any way?

We will roll out the nodes and currency in a controlled manner over the next year — taking the time to build out a secure, fast & stable platform. We see the current chaos & volatility in the crypto market (as demonstrated by the recent launch of a coin by Pablo Escobar’s brother) as a perfect demonstration of the need for a different governance model — one that brings to a public platform and associated currency a mature, expert management from a council of reputable & known global companies.