Singapore — January 30, 2019 — Hedera Hashgraph, a next-generation public ledger designed to have highly diversified governance and the most distributed consensus at scale, today announced the continued expansion of its APAC operations. Hedera now has a presence in Singapore, Korea, and Japan.
Hedera’s focus on APAC follows from strong global momentum in 2018, where it raised US$124 million to further develop its fast, fair and secure public network. This enables Hedera to capitalize on rising demand and adoption of distributed ledger solutions in Asia.
Hedera’s Asia-Pacific operations are helmed by Edgar Seah, who was formerly Head of Asset Backed Trading & Syndication and Co-Head of Asset Backed Originations at Bank of America Merrill Lynch for Asia. Sami Mian was also appointed as Hedera’s Head of Japan and Korea. Sami brings over 15 years of experience in the financial industry having previously held senior roles with Citigroup and Deutsche Bank.
“Our expansion into Asia-Pacific comes at a time where we are observing growing demand for Hedera Hashgraph’s technology, as industries converge to recognise the potential of decentralisation and the immense value it can create for enterprises and consumers alike. Led by Edgar and Sami, Asia can be the perfect springboard to expand our global network,” said Mance Harmon, CEO & Co-Founder, Hedera Hashgraph.
Asia-Pacific, a region with about 60 per cent of the world’s population, will play a significant role in the adoption of blockchain. According to research firm IDC, spending on blockchain solutions in Asia Pacific (ex-Japan) is expected to increase to USD $2.1 billion in 2022, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 72.6%.
In Asia, the company is seeing growing interest among investors, developers, business partners and financial institutions. In September 2018, Hedera announced its partnership with Mind Fund, a Hong Kong based VC to launch Helix — the world’s first accelerator to incubate next-gen distributed ledger technologies (DLT) startups exclusively on the hashgraph platform.
It is also seeing growing interest among the developer community following strong turnout for its inaugural Hedera18 Hackathon which was held concurrently in eight cities globally, including editions in Singapore and Bangalore, India. Businesses currently building apps to run on the network include:
- Alto.io, a Singapore-founded gaming company, recently announced it will integrating support for the Hedera Hashgraph to disrupt the free-to-play gaming model
- TrakInvest, a virtual trading platform headquartered in Singapore which looks to build its trading platform on hashgraph
- JDX Coin, which exists to monetize rare jade antiques that have been hidden from the world for over a century
“Hashgraph is well-positioned for explosive growth internationally and I am incredibly excited to be tasked with leading our Asia Pacific expansion efforts from Singapore,” said Edgar Seah, Head of the Asia Pacific Region for Hedera Hashgraph. “We are keenly focused on making our technology more accessible to developers and projects in the region, and look forward to working with innovative companies and agencies to help them leverage the speed, fairness, and in particular, the level of security brought by our technology and our network.”
The hashgraph consensus algorithm has also been validated as asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (ABFT) by a math proof checked by computer using the Coq Proof Assistant, and completed by Karl Crary, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. ABFT is mathematically the highest possible level of security for distributed systems, proving hashgraph’s network is a global leader around security. With the new Coq proof, Hedera becomes the first public ledger that has a computer-verified mathematical proof that it is truly asynchronous BFT.
The Hedera whitepaper can be found at https://www.hedera.com/whitepaper.
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About Hedera
Hedera Hashgraph is a public distributed ledger for building decentralized applications. Developers can build secure, fair, blazing-fast decentralized applications on top of Hedera. For more information, visit https://www.hedera.com, or follow us on Twitter at @hashgraph, Telegram at t.me/hashgraph, or Discord at https://www.hedera.com/discord. The Hedera whitepaper can be found at https://www.hedera.com/whitepaper.
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