Facebook has put a lot of effort into Libra. It has been working on it for a year and the final result looks like they have taken the good bits from a variety of places.
That’s certainly what the folks at crypto project Hedera Hashgraph think, and they are running a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal that cheekily suggests they were one of the companies that had their ideas copied.
Hedera Hashgraph describes itself as an enterprise-ready distributed ledger platform.
Mance Harmon, co-founder and chief executive of Hedera, whose company representatives met with Facebook, says he can see some of the results in Libra.
The Libra Association Council governance is a copy of the Hashgraph Council, suggests Mance.
Meeting with Facebook’s Libra team
A year after meeting the Facebook team Hedera found the Facebook Libra governance model to be a shadow of its own design.
“When we met with Facebook in 2018, they asked a lot of questions, and we explained how we had thought through both the business and technology challenges in bringing a trusted, public ledger to the market,” Harmon explained to Ethereum World News.
He continued: “Governance was a key part of this discussion, and we outlined in detail how a governing council of trusted, highly diversified organizations is essential for bootstrapping trust in the cryptocurrency, both technically and from a market adoption perspective.”
Then there’s the much-commented upon commitment by the Libra Association to move from a permissioned blockchain to a permissionless one. That mirrors the two-stage approach first seen with Hashgraph.
Unlike with the Libra Association’s council, where members merely have to pay the $10 million to become a node and be eligible to buy the interest-bearing Libra Investment Token, with the Hedera council members earn coins from actual work carried out running the network.
Hedera says it was the first and only company before Libra with such a governing council.
Members of the council include multi-billion dollar law firms AMlaw100, DLA Piper and T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom.
Hedera’s Wall Street Journal ad in today’s paper thanks Facebook for its back-handed compliment.
Below a ‘like’ icon, the print advert reads:
“Thank you Facebook Libra. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s been their internet for too long. Make it yours. #hello future”
Hedera Hashgraph uses ‘post-blockchain’ DAG tech similar to IOTA
Hedera has raised $124 million so far in its funding rounds, all in fiat.
Digital Currency Group, founded by Barry Silbert of Grayscale Investments, is among the investors in the project.
Harmon and co-founder Leemon Baird met up as part of a team that created machine-learning algorithms for the US Air Force. Harmon later went on to manage software used by the US missile defence system.
The Hedera Hashgraph platform is built on “post-blockchain” directed acyclic graph (DAG) technology.
Instead of serialised blocks, a DAG architecture becomes more efficient as it gets bigger because each new transaction is verified by nodes that have verified two previous transactions.
Current tps: Bitcoin 3.8, Ethereum 9.8 – Hashgraph can support 100k
Hedera Hashgraph platform is a “fully sharded solution” that uses proof of stake consensus.
This means the platform is able to scale at a rate far in excess of that achieved with blockchain.
Bitcoin has a transaction per second (tps) rate currently running at about 3.8 and Ethereum 9.8. Hashgrpah can support 100,000 tps.
The IOTA uses a DAG implementation for its Tangle technology.
Harmon says IOTA’s DAG is “much less secure”.
Facebook forces projects to build models enterprise will trust
Facebook has certainly shaken up crypto, with bitcoin currently trading above $11,000. Harmon agrees.
“The world of crypto changed with the Facebook Libra announcement. While the crypto market has a global presence, it is still a niche community.”
“Facebook Libra will introduce crypto to a much broader market than what currently exists,” says Harmon.
“Also, Facebook Libra made it clear that it’s no longer enough to simply have a protocol platform and a community. To compete in this market requires a governance model that mainstream, enterprise customers will trust. We led the way with the Hedera Governing Council, and now Facebook has validated that approach.”
What other ideas did Facebook borrow for Libra and from where? Let us know in the comments below
