Hedera Hashgraph: Solving for Performance & Security at Scale

Ash Bennington, senior crypto editor for Real Vision, welcomes Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera Hashgraph, to discuss consensus algorithms and the creation of Hedera Hashgraph. Starting in 2012, Harmon and his team were working to solve a distributed consensus math problem, specifically how to create a consensus algorithm that maximized both performance and security simultaneously. He states that this has been a decades old problem, and while it is clear already how to have the best security via asynchronous byzantine fault tolerance, it has always come at the expense of resource requirements—bandwidth or scaling issues. This was solved in 2015 with the creation of Hashgraph, and with its algorithm, it has led to a public distributed ledger with scalable and maximized performance and security properties. Filmed May 18th, 2021. Key Learnings: It's possible to create a consensus algorithm that makes it possible for the participants within a network to vote on transactions—however, as the number of transactions increases, the voting and, by extension, bandwidth required go up exponentially. What Hashgraph has innovated on is that by submitting just 2 hashes of information, that being the last transactions sent and received, the network can chain them into a graph and conceptually represent who knew what and when. When paired with a consensus algorithm, anyone who receives that data can calculate what the consensus would be without having to vote or ask the question, thus cutting out the middleman or bandwidth requirement and resulting in the creation of virtual voting.

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