Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) commonly have simple and inflexible forms of immutability. Hedera supports a more flexible form of controlled mutability, which allows certain changes under certain circumstances, but prevents other types of changes. One area where this is particularly important is for smart contracts.

We’re still so early in this journey we call Hedera Hashgraph. We just started opening up testnets to a wider audience of developers and boy did we learn some really cool things…things that have informed how we want to build our SDKs. Frankly, we need to make sure that developers absolutely love the SDK experience. So we’re getting smart and fun about building our SDKs with the help of those very same developers.

Some consensus algorithms are fragile — they cannot adapt to changes, either in the membership of nodes, or in the influence of those nodes towards consensus. The result is that such changes cause consensus to be prevented or corrupted. This can be a problem for some types of distributed ledgers, but it is not a problem for Hedera.

The highest security standard for consensus algorithms is known as Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (ABFT). The hashgraph algorithm, as used in the Hedera public ledger, achieves this gold standard, with a mathematical proof that it is ABFT. This proof-of-stake consensus system was first proved to be ABFT in a rigorous math proof published in 2016. That proof has now been verified by computer in a formal verification completed by a Carnegie Mellon University professor — and we think it is important to explain what that means.

Dallas TX – Oct 18, 2018 – Hedera Hashgraph, a next-generation distributed public ledger with highly diversified governance, today announced the winners of the Hedera18 global hackathon, plus seven regional winners and the inaugural Hedera MVPs. Hedera today also announced the launch of hashgraph.org, a free educational resource to the hashgraph community.

Dallas TX, Hedera18 Developer Conference – October 17, 2018 – Hedera Hashgraph, a next-generation distributed public ledger with highly diversified governance, today announced that the hashgraph consensus algorithm has been validated as asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (ABFT) by a math proof checked by computer using the Coq system.

Dallas TX – Oct 10, 2018 – Hedera Hashgraph, a next-generation distributed public ledger with highly diversified governance, today announced the public release of the Hedera SDK in Java. The SDK is open sourced under an Apache 2 license, and can be found at github.com/hashgraph/hedera-sdk-java. With the SDK, developers can now begin to develop Hedera-based applications for use on the Hedera platform. 

From the origin of Bitcoin as a digital gold, to Vitalik establishing a new development paradigm, distributed ledger technology has begun to enable a fully decentralized world. Understand the growth of distributed ledgers and how the technology has changed to make new dapps possible in the Evolution of Distributed Ledger Technologies infographic.

This week, Mance Harmon, Co-Founder and CEO, provided a quick update on Hedera18, our first hashgraph developer conference, including a free global livestream of the conference, new conference pricing, and 4 additional hackathon locations. The video and full transcript of the update are inside.