The Hedera network has expanded from 21 to 22 nodes in the mainnet upgrade to v0.17.4 with the addition of The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) transitional node (Node 22 | Account ID 0.0.24) in Virginia, USA.
In addition, the Luizalabs team has made the decision to move its permanent node (Node 7 | Account ID 0.0.10) from its original location in Singapore to Sao Paolo, Brazil — this is the first permanent Hedera network node in South America.
You can find node and network status updates by visiting https://status.hedera.com/
Understanding decentralization: The path to permissionless nodes
Hedera’s path to full decentralization calls for the expansion of its network. This is performed by establishing new network nodes, as outlined in the Understanding decentralization at Hedera Hashgraph: The path the permissionless network nodes whitepaper.
The expansion of the Hedera network is planned to go from a limited number of permissioned council member nodes, expanding further into hundreds of permissioned nodes by parties outside of the Hedera Council. Eventually, permissionless nodes will be run by anyone who would like to participate in validating transactions and contributing compute, storage, and bandwidth, to earn hbars.
It’s essential that the Hedera network continues to expand to ensure mainnet reliability. More nodes on the Hedera mainnet means an additional level of trust and redundancy if any nodes go offline or experience performance degradation due to standard on-premises data center or cloud provider issues.
LSE | Virginia, USA | New Node
LSE joined the Hedera Governing Council on August 19th, 2021. They’re being onboarded and determining in which council member committees they’ll be actively participating.
LSE’s node on the Hedera mainnet is “21” and account “0.0.24”. This node is hosted in MassiveGrid located in Virginia, USA. Hedera Hashgraph will assist with running this node for the time being and will be working with LSE on a permanent home for their node as their technical teams are onboarded.
Once on a permanent node, LSE will be in full control from an operations and maintenance perspective. Hedera Hashgraph will only maintain access to ensure codebase upgrades until the connect, reconnect, and update network automation capabilities are completed in 2021.
Magazine Luiza (Magalu) | South America | Decentralization Update
Magazine Luiza (Magalu) is an inaugural member of the Hedera Governing Council who joined on February 20th, 2019.
The Luizalabs team has made the decision to move its permanent node (Node 7 | Account ID 0.0.10) from its original location hosted by DigitalOcean in Singapore to a self-hosted node in Sao Paolo, Brazil — this is the first permanent Hedera network node in South America. Hedera Hashgraph will only maintain access to ensure codebase upgrades until the network automation connect, reconnect, and update work is completed in 2021.
