Last week, Hedera Hashgraph, a Dallas-based next-gen public ledger company, announced the launch of the Hedera Governing Council. The group will govern changes to the software, which is run by millions of Hedera distributed nodes, with the goal to provide stability and guaranteed continued decentralization.

During Hedera’s first annual summit in Seoul, South Korea, the founding members of the council were also released: Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, Magazine Luiza, Nomura Holdings, Inc., and Swisscom Blockchain AG.

The initial council members represent telecom, technology, financial services, legal, and retail industries worldwide.

Hedera’s distributed ledger technology (DLT), considered to be post-blockchain, is in the same space of offering businesses of all types secure, public ledgers.

“A general-purpose public ledger should be governed by representatives from a broad range of market sectors and geographies, each with world-class expertise in their respective industries,” Hedera CEO Mance Harmon said in a statement. “With this inaugural group, we are demonstrating the caliber of organizations it takes to deliver long-lasting, stable governance for the industry’s first enterprise-ready public ledger suitable for mission-critical applications.”

He added that the governing members of the council will offer technical expertise in a number of areas, such as managing business operations, economics and currency markets, and how to navigate the evolving regulatory environment.

The importance of decentralization

One goal of the council—guaranteeing continued decentralization—is a response to a study by the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3) at Cornell University, Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The report found that the largest public distributed ledgers have become more centralized over time. For example, the top four Bitcoin miners and top three Ethereum miners control more than 50 percent of the world’s entire hash rate. This result is in part due to a lack of governance model that ensures decentralization.

Hedera’s tech is different in that it doesn’t require mining or proof of work. The model is designed so that no single company has control over the council and it can’t be overly influenced by members or node operators.

The council’s governance model is based on one used by National BankAmericard Inc., founded in 1968 and now known as Visa.

Hedera’s vision with its DLT is to create a safer, fairer, more secure Internet. To reach this vision, the company is focuses on four fundamental roadblocks to the adoption of DLT: technology, security, stability, and governance.

Dallas Innovates previously reported that members of the governing council can serve two three-year terms for a maximum of six years. “There’s nobody else in the market that has anything like that. It’s the most representative governance body of any platform,” Harmon says.

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