Hedera

Return to Glossary

Hedera is a public, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and governing body built from the ground-up to support new and existing applications running at web scale. Developers use DLTs to build computational trust directly into their applications. This allows individuals and businesses who might not know or trust each other to quickly and inexpensively collaborate. Public DLTs allow for creating and exchanging value, proving identity, verifying and authenticating important data, and much more.

Hedera is unique in that it achieves the same result as the most ubiquitous public Blockchains (such as Bitcoin or Ethereum), but in a way that is faster, fairer, and more energy efficient, stable, and secure — these advantages can be attributed to the underlying Directed Acyclical Graphs (DAGs) hashgraph consensus algorithm and the global enterprise governing body, which owns and operates Hedera today.

The Hedera public network is built on the hashgraph distributed consensus algorithm, invented by Dr. Leemon Baird, Hedera Co-founder and Chief Scientist. The Hashgraph consensus algorithm provides near-perfect efficiency in bandwidth usage and consequently can process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second (tps) in a single Shard (a fully connected, [dido:public:ra:xapend:xapend.a_glossary:p:p2p]] mesh of nodes in a network).

Unlike a traditional proof-of-work blockchain, which selects a single Miner Node to choose the next block, the Node Network community running Hashgraph come to an agreement on which transactions to add to the ledger as a collective. Through gossip-about-gossip and virtual voting, the hashgraph network comes to consensus on both the validity and the consensus timestamp of every transaction. If the transaction is valid and within the appropriate time, the ledger’s state will be updated to include the transaction with 100% certainty (finality).

Source: https://hedera.com/learning/what-is-hedera-hashgraph