Hedera Hashgraph Bags $100 Million
Distributed ledger technology platform Hedera Hashgraph has earned $100 million from its funding round via a future token sale held recently.
Proceeds will be earmarked for completing the development and launching the startup’s network, according to Mance Harmon, chief executive officer and co-founder of Hedera. It will go to the improvement of its public ledger.
“With this funding, we will be able to accelerate development of key services to be provided by Hedera – including a cryptocurrency, file storage service, and smart contract platform – to help make it not only what we believe is the fastest and most secure public ledger available, but also the most feature-rich for developers looking to build highly decentralized apps,” Harmon explained in a statement.
Although he did not name the majority of investors who participated in their recent fundraising activity, Hedera employees gave 10 percent of the total amount while Blocktower’s Ari Paul made a contribution.
“We’re taking that tech, the hashgraph, and trying to address the problems we see in the market that prevent mainstream adoption of public ledger technology and there’s really four categories,” Harmon said.
“As a technology, it’s a fundamental advance in the world of distributed systems. It has fantastic performance, and it achieves the best in security one can have in the field,” Harmon said in an interview with VentureBeat.
“Small systems have achieved this in the past, but never at scale. Bitcoin had terrible performance, but it is reasonably secure. It was always a trade-off. What hashgraph does for the first time is break that trade-off, maximizing both security and performance,” he added.
Moving forward, Hedera is planning to raise another $20 million via a public initial coin offering (ICO) which will be open only to accredited investors.
The recent funding round is part of the $18 million generated through a private token sale staged earlier this year. At that time, the sale represented less than 20 percent of the total supply. Hedera had said that MZ (formerly Machine Zone), the brainchild behind popular mobile games such as Mobile Strike, would developed distributed applications on top of the protocol.
Hedera would use a patented codebase in an open network. While the code can be viewed publicly, developers can curate applications on top of the network without securing any license. In simplest terms, it is offering “transparency with stability.”
“We can guarantee our platform will never fork. It will be “one platform with one currency forever,” Harmon said earlier.
“The hard forks that bitcoin & ethereum have experienced have arguably damaged the network effect of their corresponding currencies – creating confusion & uncertainty in the marketplace. Similarly, the explosion of altcoins (and the dubious legitimacy & value of many of them) does not engender the necessary confidence in businesses & consumers considering adopting crypto currencies,” based on the firm’s white paper.
The distributed ledger technology is created by software company Swirlds, which has already deployed private versions with various enterprises. Hashgraph asserts itself as a more secure, scalable, and fairer technology than the proof-of-work mechanism securing bitcoin or the allowed systems which banks and other entities have been working with.