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 16 nodes to 18 nodes, with the inclusion of Standard Bank and eftpos. During this release the temporary Zain Group node will migrate to Zain Group’s on-premises data center and be managed by their IT teams, supporting Hedera’s decentralization goals.
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 without significant impact on performance or security. 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.
Zain Group announced joining the Hedera Governing Council on June 15th, 2020, and has joined the Technology, Regulatory, Marketing, and Coin committees on the Hedera Governing Council.
Zain Group’s Hedera network node number is 6 and account 0.0.9 — this node was previously deployed as a temporary node under Hedera’s management in Maidenhead, UK in a eukhost data center. As part of the v0.12 update, this node has transitioned over to Zain Group’s IT teams, located on their own infrastructure in Kuwait City, Kuwait.
Standard Bank announced joining the Hedera Governing Council on February 24th, 2021, and have joined the Technology, Regulatory, Marketing, and Coin committees on the Hedera Governing Council.
The Standard Bank network node on the Hedera mainnet is node 16 and account ID 0.0.19 — this node is deployed in a physical data center hosted by MassiveGrid located in New York, NY; Hedera will assist in managing this node temporarily as the new Hedera Council member is onboarded. In the recent upgrade of the Hedera network to v0.12 this node was added to the network but is not online; it will be brought online during the next scheduled mainnet maintenance period. Once the Standard Bank technical teams are properly set up and they obtain regulatory approval, the node will be migrated to a data center in South Africa and full ownership of the node will transition to Standard Bank.
eftpos announced joining the Hedera Governing Council on January 27th, 2021, and have joined the Technology, Regulatory, Marketing, and Coin committees on the Hedera Governing Council.
Eftpos’ network node on the Hedera mainnet is node 17 and account ID 0.0.20 — this node is initially deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the US West (Oregon) region. Hedera will assist in managing this node temporarily as the new Hedera Council member is onboarded. The temporary node will be replaced by one operated in Australia by eftpos’ technical team once the permanent node has completed testing.