What’s the Future of Distributed Ledgers?
SEATTLE — Blockchain may no longer be at the peak of its hype cycle, but the technology is still sparking innovation, as real-life use cases emerge. Distributed ledgers (DLTs), for instance, which allow for the secure recording and transfer of digital assets without reliance on a centralized authority, have obvious advantages for financial organizations.
DLTs are at the core of an emerging ecosystem built on open source. In this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers, recorded at Open Source Summit North America, Andrew Aitken, chief open source officer of Hedera, and Leemon Baird, co-CEO of Swirlds Labs, expanded on their OSSNA keynote talk on DLTs with Alex Williams, founder and publisher of TNS.
For DLTs, Baird said, “We have an open source ledger, the blockchain is open source, you can think of it like an operating system that’s open source. You can run programs on top of it that are open source, you can run programs on top of it that are not open source.”
The layer built on top of all this is also open source. “We had to come up with an algorithm for how they’re going to talk to each other and come to an agreement,” Baird said.
That’s the Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm, which he created. “In 2015, I finally solved the math problem to make it work,” Baird said.” I’d just been doing it for fun.”
The project, a distributed consensus mechanism used by Hedera, combines a hashgraph data mechanism with a gossip protocol; it allows each node in a network to share information about all the transactions it knows about with other nodes in the same network.
“It has some advantages,” Baird said. “It’s more secure, and it’s very fast and very efficient.”
Building the Open Source DLT Ecosystem
The Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm’s efficiency and security, Baird said, is “all in the math. It’s actually asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant, which is just the very highest level of security. And it’s designed in a way that it’s basically as fast as the internet would allow.”
For the past nine months, the Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm has been under the Apache 2.0 open source license. From the start of the project, he said, the hope was to avoid the centralization of control that can happen with open source initiatives as they mature.
“Over time it narrows down, and you end up with five people that actually do the controlling, that’s just kind of how it evolves,” Baird said. “What we said from the beginning is no, we’re gonna have a wide range of very big organizations, big universities, big companies.
“We have 32 of them, and they will jointly govern it. And they act as checks and balances on each other. And they’re spread around the world. They’re on every continent except Antarctica.”
Aitken aims to help build an ecosystem of contributors around DTLs, using the Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm, with adherence to open source best practices in building those apps. “We want to be not only be very decentralized from a government perspective, and be very transparent in our governance, but we also want to be transparent in how the software itself is built and maintained,” he said.
“We have some great wallets that are … optimized for our network,” he added. “But we also need to have more wallets, we need to have more exchange capabilities.”
“We need to really be able to ensure that we are truly cross-chain, I guess, is the best way to explain it. So we need more applications that facilitate that.”
Check out the full episode for more on what DLT’s 2.0 era looks like.
