Working with Hedera Hashgraph to support the next generation of distributed ledger technology

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) developers continue to present exciting opportunities for the expansion of the digital economy. DLT can increase security and decrease the friction and costs associated with the secure exchange of information, from family photos to international remittances. While many recent DLT advancements have occurred primarily on top of public and permissionless DLTs such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, the challenge of delivering fast and inexpensive transactions with finality has slowed the rate of DLT adoption by large enterprises that require the ability to process thousands of transactions per second. 

To address these challenges, Hedera developed a DLT that’s based on the hashgraph consensus algorithm. This algorithm was leveraged to build the Hedera network which began open access in September 2019. The Hedera network now offers the accessibility advantages of an open public network and the technical capability to securely deliver large volumes of faster and less expensive transactions to enterprises all over the world.  

But low levels of friction are not enough to ensure organizations will conduct cryptoeconomic activity on Hedera's network; participants must also trust in the stability and reliability of the operations and governance of Hedera's protocol and network. 

Since the inception of its DLT, Hedera has ensured the stability and reliability of its network by leveraging the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) premium network tier, a highly provisioned, low-latency global fiber optic network. By using Google's network, Hedera has been able to focus on nurturing its community of developers who are building high throughput, low latency decentralized applications (dApps) on Hedera. 

“We initially turned to Google Cloud for its ease of use, networking advantages and overall platform performance,” said Atul Mahamuni, SVP of Products for Hedera. “The Google Cloud Platform was the perfect foundation to help us achieve our goals to bring enterprise-ready DLT adoption at scale.” 

Now, Hedera is expanding this relationship by selecting Google Cloud as a preferred cloud provider for its public testnets and Hedera Consensus Service ecosystem. Thanks to the extensive geographical coverage of Google's network, the growing global Hedera developer community can ensure both access and performance of their applications no matter where they are in the world. 

“As we continue to evolve our infrastructure, we’re excited to expand our work with Google Cloud to now make DLT even more readily available for our community members, no matter their size or industry,” said Mahamuni. “This is about developing solutions that drive real business value.” 

Finally, Google is becoming a member of the Hedera Governing Council, which leads strategic planning for the Hedera network and works to ensure the stability and reliability of network protocols and operations. As part of our council membership, Google Cloud will operate a Hedera network node, and make the ledger data available for analytics alongside GCP's other public DLT datasets, bolstering GCP's position as the cloud provider of choice for DLT networks and decentralized applications. 

We’re inspired by what Hedera has accomplished to date, and look forward to providing the infrastructure and technologies to support what’s possible with distributed ledger technology.