An essential aspect of Hedera’s path towards full decentralization is network expansion through the establishment and management of new network nodes on Hedera. While these nodes are currently run solely by Hedera Governing Council members, the plan is to eventually allow anyone who wants to earn hbars for contributing towards Hedera network consensus.
Hedera Hashgraph, LLC is excited to announce that the mainnet has expanded from 18 nodes to 20 nodes, with the inclusion of Électricité de France (EDF) and Shinhan Bank. In addition, Hedera’s network is being further decentralized with LG’s node migrating from their transitional node in a LiquidWeb data center in Lansing, Michigan to their permanent node hosted by AWS in Seoul, South Korea.
As outlined in the Hedera Hashgraph whitepaper, the Hedera network’s expansion plan begins with permissioned nodes limited to Hedera Council members, The network will expand further into hundreds of permissioned nodes by parties outside of the Hedera Council, and then eventually having thousands of permissionless nodes run by anyone who would like to participate in contributing to network consensus and earn hbars.
It’s essential to the Hedera network that expansion continues in order to ensure mainnet reliability and decentralization with minimal impact on performance. Additional nodes on Hedera’s mainnet mean more redundancy if any nodes go offline or experience performance degradation due to on-premises data center or cloud provider issues.
Électricité de France (EDF) | Paris, France | New Node
EDF announced joining the Hedera Governing Council on March 4th, 2021. The permanent EDF network node on the Hedera mainnet is node number 18 and account ID 0.0.21 — this node is hosted by Exaion, a wholly-owned subsidiary of EDF focused on delivering blockchain and high-performance computing services located in Paris, France.
EDF is looking to leverage the Hedera Token Service (HTS) to develop use cases for the energy domain and EDF’s operations, including the deployment of a carbon offset and credit system on Hedera. Additionally, they’re exploring other use cases and proofs-of-concept that leverage Hedera’s unique speed and security, such as developing Exaion’s potential to deliver blockchain/DLT and high-performance computing services.
Shinhan Bank | Leeds, UK | New Node
Shinhan Bank announced joining the Hedera Governing Council on April 13th, 2021. The Shinhan Bank network node on the Hedera mainnet is node 19 and account ID 0.0.22 — this node is deployed in a physical data center hosted by eUKhost located in Leeds, UK; Hedera will assist in managing this node for one year as Shinhan Bank is onboarded. Once the Shinhan Bank technical teams are properly set up and they obtain regulatory approval, the node will be migrated to a data center under their control, and ownership of the node will transition to Shinhan Bank.
Shinhan Bank is expected to increase the efficiency of its internal processes using Hedera Hashgraph. Shinhan’s services include Policy Loan, Pension Fund, and Interest Rate Swap deals, which run today on Hyperledger Fabric. As more financial services begin to transition to public blockchain and DLT networks, Shinhan is looking to build more services directly on Hedera. They’re also exploring interoperable and hybrid architectures, such as the IBM Blockchain Platform, which utilizes Hedera.
LG | Seoul, South Korea | Decentralization Update
LG announced joining the Hedera Governing Council on May 27th, 2020. Their Hedera network node number is 0 and account 0.0.3 — this node was previously deployed as a transitional node under Hedera’s management in Lansing, Michigan in a LiquidWeb data center. As part of the v0.14.0 update, this node has transitioned to LG’s permanent node hosted by AWS in Seoul, South Korea.
