Hedera Hashgraph launches Consensus Service on Mainnet

Hedera Hashgraph, an enterprise-grade public distributed ledger, today announced that the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) is open to developers on the Hedera mainnet. HCS has been in development at Hedera since mid-2019 and answers the question, 'How do we incorporate decentralized trust into new or existing applications?'

HCS affords developers a unique opportunity to create verifiable timestamps and ordering of events for any application. Hedera is the first public distributed ledger that allows developers to build their own application networks (appnet), a set of computers which enable privacy but utilize the trust of Hedera's public ledger as their consensus engine. The new service takes full advantage of hashgraph's high-throughput for speed and asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance for security. Hedera Consensus Service can be used standalone or as a decentralized ordering service with other ledgers, such as Hyperledger Fabric, Corda, or Ethereum.

Examples of how companies might utilize HCS include asset tracking across a supply chain, music stream counts to determine remittance for digital rights management, an auditable log of asset transfers, and payable events across an advertising platform.

Leemon Baird, Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Hedera Hashgraph, said: "Logging transactions in the exact order they occur is crucial to use cases across nearly every industry. HCS combines hashgraph's fast, fair, and secure consensus algorithm with the trust and governance of Hedera's public network. It allows groups working together to then apply this trust and governance to their applications that need both trust and privacy."

The availability of the HCS comes following open access of Hedera Hashgraph's mainnet in September 2019 — at which point the platform became publicly accessible. Since then, over 40 million transactions have been conducted on the Hedera network. HCS is the fourth service now available to enterprises and developers leveraging the Hedera public network, adding to the network's initial three services of cryptocurrency, smart contracts, and file services. The HCS whitepaper, released in June 2019, was co-authored by IBM, a member of the Hedera Governing Council.

"I am delighted to see HCS becoming reality and see it as another differentiator for Hedera in supporting our mission to build usable, real-time and blockchain-enabled healthcare applications. With HCS you get many of the benefits—in particular the perceived privacy—of a private Distributed Ledger Technology implementation, but also can use the Hedera public network to get transaction finality on the chain, which I see as key for demonstrating computational trust in our software through transparent, publicly interrogatable data provenance and real-time reporting." -- Jim Nasr, CEO, Acoer, a developer of blockchain and distributed ledger-enabled applications.

"The Hedera Consensus Service allows AdsDax to achieve its vision of providing full transparency and accountability of tracked event data. With encrypted event data signed off by the Hedera network, gaining all the benefits of Coq proven ABFT security, fair timestamps, ordering and 100% finality, Advertisers can be more confident that their data is both accurate and tamper-proof, aiding in the fight to reduce ad-fraud and recover the billions of dollars lost each year in wasted ad spend." -- Ian Mullins, Founder & CEO of AdsDax, a blockchain advertising platform.

"Hedera Consensus Service delivers the high-throughput, auditability, and fair ordering required by the Armada Chain platform. We're able to securely process data in our customer's enterprise supply chains, such as track and trace, without the drawbacks of using smart contracts." -- Kent Makishima, Co-Founder & CEO at Armada Chain, which empowers global supply chain collaboration.

"Nickel FX platform is planning to utilize Hedera Consensus Service, in place of Kafka, as a decentralized ordering service for application events in Hyperledger Fabric. We're combining the trustless consensus of a public network with the privacy of a private network for all our sensitive transactions and data." -- Liam Julien Lin, CEO & Co-Founder, Nickel, Asia's first FX exchange on the blockchain.

"The Hedera Consensus Service greatly simplifies our architecture and dramatically reduces costs and our time to market with new products. We're now able to develop guaranteed secure exchanges of classified, encrypted information among organizations between remote, secured local networks across public networks." -- Jiro Olcott, Founder & CEO of Power Transition, a blockchain-powered software architecture for intelligent energy systems.

"Hedera Consensus Service offers high-throughput and public verifiability of in-game events that the decentralized gaming industry has been waiting for. End users get to experience online gameplay in an entirely new way — with real-time and auditable stats — while helping prevent fraud across our entire set of games." -- Ray Choi, CTO of SkyPeople, a blockchain-powered gaming company.

Baird concluded, "Stock exchanges, marketplaces, enterprise databases, and others all rely on having a trusted timestamp for each transaction. If the decentralized world intends to disrupt these spaces, it needs to be able to provide fair consensus timestamps, which show the time when the entire network received the transaction. The HCS' order of transactions is recorded in seconds, with finality and fairness, and high throughput. This sets Hedera apart from other blockchains and layer 2 applications whose verification times or throughput are too slow to offer such a service. The public availability of HCS is a big milestone, giving developers the ability to build on fast, trusted ordering and timestamps."