DLA Piper has joined the initial group of Governing Council members for Hedera Hashgraph, a next-generation public ledger designed to have highly diversified governance and the most distributed consensus at scale. The announcement was made at Hedera Hashgraph’s first annual summit in Seoul, Korea.
As part of the council, DLA Piper will help oversee changes to the software run by millions of Hedera distributed nodes over time. The governing council has been established to ensure stability and guaranteed continued decentralization to the Hedera Hashgraph distributed public ledger.
Scott Thiel, Partner at DLA Piper and the firm’s initial representative on the Hedera Hashgraph governing council, commented: “We have been at the forefront of helping organizations understand legal frameworks and issues in leveraging blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) for a number of years now, and are also adopting such technology in our own client solutions. Hedera uniquely enables many mechanisms within smart contracts – including Know Your Customer (KYC) and AML (Anti Money Laundering) compliance – which are significant breakthroughs in DLT. As we work to bring these kinds of technologies to our clients, we are pleased to join the Hedera Hashgraph Council as an inaugural governing member, to help further shape the adoption of DLT across organizations and governments globally.”
Hedera’s vision is to create a safer, fairer, more secure internet — one in which online communities can collectively create and evolve shared worlds in cyberspace, and on which developers can build trusted applications that enable safe collaboration and commerce, without entrusting a central organization with personal data. To realize this vision, Hedera has focused on addressing four fundamental roadblocks to the adoption of public distributed ledger technology — technology, security, stability, and governance.
Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera, added: “A general-purpose public ledger should be governed by representatives from a broad range of market sectors and geographies, each with world-class expertise in their respective industries. With this inaugural group, we are demonstrating the caliber of organizations it takes to deliver long-lasting, stable governance for the industry’s first enterprise-ready public ledger suitable for mission-critical applications. Hedera’s governing members will provide the technical expertise to manage the technical roadmap, business expertise to manage business operations, expertise in economics and currency markets to manage the cryptocurrency, and legal expertise to help navigate the evolving regulatory environment. With the Hedera Hashgraph Council, you are seeing a true distributed governance model finally come to fruition, and we could not be more excited about this first group of council members.”
Other initial governing council members include Deutsche Telekom, Magazine Luiza, Nomura Holdings, Inc., and Swisscom Blockchain AG, representing some of the most respected names in the telecommunications, technology, financial services, legal, and retail industries globally.
