An essential aspect of Hedera’s path towards full decentralization of its technology and governance is network expansion by establishing new network nodes. We’re excited to announce today that Hedera has expanded its network from 14 nodes to 16 nodes, with the inclusion of Avery Dennison and Dentons in its most recent mainnet update.
As outlined in the Hedera whitepaper, Hedera’s network expansion plan is to go from a limited number of permissioned council member nodes, expanding further into hundreds of permissioned nodes by parties outside of the council, and then eventually having thousands of permissionless nodes run by anyone who would like to participate and earn hbars.
It’s essential to Hedera that we continue network expansion to ensure mainnet reliability without sacrificing performance or security; more nodes on Hedera’s mainnet means an additional level of redundancy if any nodes go offline or experience performance degradation due to standard on-prem data center or cloud provider issues.
In 2021 Hedera will continue its work on network automations, which allow for connect, reconnect, and upgrade capabilities; these functionalities will assist with node upgrades and maintenance with minimal or no downtime — this is outlined in the Hedera roadmap. Network automations are a hard requirement for Hedera to transition from our current state of being a permissioned network to becoming fully permissionless, with node operators having full control over their node.
Avery Dennison joined the Hedera Governing Council on July 2nd, 2020, and are active participants in the Coin Committee and the Data Integrity, Decentralized Identity, and Tokenization special interest groups (SIGs).
Avery Dennison’s network node on the Hedera mainnet is “14” and account “0.0.17”; this node is deployed in a Sungard data center facility located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, and fully managed by the Avery Dennison IT team. It’s worth noting that network node numbers start at 0, as displayed on the Hedera status page.
Although Avery Dennison will be in full control of their node from an operations and maintenance perspective, Hedera will still temporarily have access to ensure codebase upgrades — this is until the network automation work described above is completed in 2021.
Dentons joined the Hedera Governing Council on December 10th, 2020. They’re in the process of being onboarded and determining in which council member committees they’ll be actively participating.
Their network node on the Hedera mainnet is “15” and account “0.0.18” — the node is deployed in a Linode data center facility located in Frankfurt, Germany; Hedera will run it for the time being, and we will be transitioning ownership of the node to Dentons as we onboard their technical teams. They will soon be in full control of their node from an operations and maintenance perspective. Hedera will maintain access to ensure codebase upgrades for the same reasons as Avery Dennison.
As Hedera progresses through it’s phased approach from a permissioned network to fully permissionless, we’ll continue to bring transparency and provide updates along the way. We hope that the Hedera community and blockchain industry will look to Hedera as a leader when approaching public network decentralization safely and methodically.