Hedera Hashgraph, the blockchain project that has the potential to reach millions of transactions per second, is opening its beta mainnet up to developers on September 16 to create an account and start building on the platform. Hedera made the announcement Thursday in a blog post having been working hard on the project ever since the $124 million ICO in 2018. Hashgraph technology has long been seen as one of the few viable blockchain technologies that could compete with traditional centralized technologies and will be able to rival the likes of Visa in terms of payment processing.
Hedera @hashgraph public mainnet open access (OA) is planned for Sept 16, allowing any #developer to create an account and build #decentralized applications. News here: https://t.co/HqGAMYoLmR #hellofuture pic.twitter.com/5Bs1KgN4Ya
— Hedera Hashgraph (@hashgraph) August 29, 2019
Start Slow(ish)
Referring to this initial test stage as Open Access, the network will start out throttled to 10,000 transactions per second (almost six times faster than XRP, even in this throttled state) with the smart contracts and file service throttled to 10 transactions per second, increasing systematically throughout the rest of 2019. This throttling is designed to allow Hedera to roll out network services in a measured and responsible way, with methodical speed increases implemented over time up to capacity on mainnet release.
Advantages and Disadvantages of DAGs
Hashgraph is a form of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) blockchain, which will not surprise many, given that few other blockchain technologies have the capability to meet such speeds as this. Open, permissionless blockchains like those employed by Bitcoin and Ethereum is that new blocks are created infrequently, which creates bottlenecks at busy times. DAGs use graphs with ‘edges’, connections that are essentially branches of a flow chart all flowing in the same direction, meaning that transactions don’t have to wait until a new block is formed before moving along the chain. This results in theoretically infinite, lightning-fast transactions, with the obvious benefit for organizations that need to process a great many transactions at speed.
DAGs, however, are not decentralized – they are private blockchains with the information only readable to selected people within the assigned user group. This makes them useful for businesses for not for blockchains where public accountability is required. If blockchain technology really takes off at an enterprise level, DAGs like Hashgraph will likely be at the forefront of the revolution. Hedera Hashgraph was identified by Abele Group CEO Phil Woods back in September 2018 as a technology to watch, who says he favours it as a future payment processor.
