Hedera Governing Council to buy hashgraph IP, and open-source projects code

Published at: Jan. 19, 2022

The Hedera Governing Council has officially voted to purchase the intellectual property rights to the hashgraph consensus algorithm from founding architect and inaugural member of the council, Swirlds Inc, for an undisclosed fee.

A Jan. 19 announcement also details plans to transition their code to an open-source model this year under Apache 2.0 license, in addition to transferring core team members such as CEO Mance Harmon and chief scientist Dr. Leemon Baird from Hedera to Swirlds Inc. as the CEO and CTO respectively, and deploying community staking and node opportunities, among other updates.

Hedera Hashgraph is an enterprise-grade distributed ledger technology designed to create decentralized applications in the Web3 sphere.

It's governing council is composed of 39 corporations including Google, IBM, Tata Communications and Boeing, who each support the project's decentralized ambitions through the establishment and operation of blockchain nodes, and participating in governance voting, among other duties.

Hedera’s evolution to an open-source technology differs from their current model of open-review, in which the code appears as publicly visible, but is not accessible for editing or developmental purposes by the global community.

The decision to enact this change came about following conclusive technical assessments that the probability of a network split within the Hedera ecosystem is highly unlikely, and therefore the patent upholding legislative exclusivity to the technology can be safely distributed into the public domain, with assurances that it will not serve as an advantageous tool for market competitors, but rather a mechanism to foster internal growth.

Baird, the newly appointed CTO of Swirlds, and co-chair of the Hedera Council’s Technical Steering and Product Committee, said:

“From day one, I have had a vision to enable ‘Shared Worlds’, where anyone can gather, collaborate, conduct commerce, and control their own online footprint.

Baird also noted that the next challenge for Hedera is to expand from a Layer 1 protocol “to deliver products and services that enable others to leverage the power of the Layer 1 protocol to create value.”

Harmon and Baird, among others are scheduled to host a YouTube webinar at 11 a.m. ET today to discuss the Shared Worlds initiative in further detail, alongside developments over the coming months.

From a technical perspective, Hedera’s native token, HBAR has largely consolidated in the $0.33 to $0.25 price range since the turn of the year, currently valued at $0.257.

Earlier this month, Hedera partnered with London-based tech firm, Neuron Innovations on a drone initiative designed to collate and store quantitative data metrics on an array of sectors including commercial and military aviation, as well as government initiatives.

Supported by the United Kingdom's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the pilot scheme — conducted in April and October 2021 — is expected to support the adoption of drones into the existing air traffic transportation system.