Indian telecom giant Tata Communications along with IBM have joined the governance council of a blockchain-based public network, Hedera Hashgraph, for companies. Currently, eight out of 39 available seats for the members of governing council are filled, as announced by the network on Monday.

“Our goal is to create the most decentralized governing body of any of the major public platforms,” said ManceHarmon, the CEO of Hedera Hashgraph. “We’re covering multiple industries … and we’re wanting global coverage.”

Hedera stressed on its supportof distributed ledger technology (DLT), whichoperates differently than the blockchain technology, due to its ability tofacilitate distributed file storageas well as micropayments,andsupport smart contracts. Thiswill ultimately enableprivate networks to plug transfer tothe public onesto make useof its transaction ordering mechanism.

Hedera gained over $124 million after three rounds of funding done with simple agreements for future tokens (SAFTs).

IBM is the first tech giant and Tata is India’s first company to collaborate with the network. Japanese financial company Nomura, law firm DLA Piper, and Deutsche Telekom are some of the network’s governing members. Council members are invited and granted fee income for operating nodes by Hedera.

Public-private partnership

IBM is most interested to see how private networks interact with the public ones.

“The most exciting part is the proposed Hedera Consensus Service,” said Bryan Gross, principal offering manager of the IBM Blockchain Platform. “It has the potential to provide the core innovation of proof-of-work blockchains, like bitcoin and ethereum, without the performance and privacy trade-offs that are typically associated with these networks.”

The Hedera protocol is created to integrate the private and public networks. Therefore, IBM will use the same to develop trust in custom Hyperledger Fabric networks. 

“Hedera Consensus Service makes it possible for Hyperledger projects out there to use the service to put transactions in order and eliminate the need for them to stand up nodes for transaction ordering, and they get the trust model of a public network,” Harmon stated.

Tata Communications is a part of Tata Group, the Indian conglomerate. It purportedly said in a press release that it aims to leverage DLT for improving interoperability.

Checks and balances

Harmon commented that the integration of the two big firms will decentralize Hedera’s governance. That governance comprises of a system of balances and checks which are expected to prevent the power from being merged at the network.

Members of the council approve the advancement for Hedera’s codebase and in assigning policies for the network’s nodes.

Council members can only serve for two consecutive 3-year terms, if the council approves of them to continue. Hedera’s source code is open patented – an arrangement with the objective of preventingfraud, but is accessible for review.