What Is Hashgraph? How Hashgraph Works?
In 2016, a new distributed ledger technology named Hashgraph was introduced by the co-founder and CTO of Swirlds, Leemon Baird.
This technology can secure the network from different types of attacks by using its asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) consensus algorithm.
It is mainly focussed on five fundamentals such as Performance, Security, Governance, Stability, and Regulatory Compliance.
Hashgraph technology found very useful and widely adopted as it has a great scope for scalability. But this technology still in the development phase.
Unfortunately, Hashgraph technology works in a centralized manner (limited private nodes network) so we can’t compare it with Blockchain technology which was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and blockchain is a decentralized public ledger (unlimited public nodes network).
Please keep in mind that blockchain and hashgraph both are different technology with different uses and goals, so don’t compare them together. Also, both scalability and security can’t be achieved together as if you want scalability then security will be a problem and if you want security then scalability will be a problem. So please don’t compare an apple with an orange.
In this article, we will cover the following topics:
- What is Hashgraph?
- How Hashgraph Works?
- Characteristics of Hashgraph
- Disadvantages of Hashgraph
- Applications of Hashgraph
- Conclusion
- Some important links for Hashgraph
1 What Is Hashgraph?
Hashgraph made up of two words “hash” and “graph” that shows it is a graphical representation of hashes.
Simply hashgraph is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) that uses the concept of gossip about gossip protocol and virtual voting system.
It is also a distributed ledger technology but does not use the blocks like blockchain in order to stores information or data whereas it used gossip protocol with the timestamp and virtual voting that makes it very fast, secure, stable, and fair.
Hashgraph provides a high throughput of thousands of transactions per second which makes it more scalable and adaptable as compared to blockchain technology where bitcoin and ethereum can only handle 7 and 15 transactions per second.
The technology of hashgraph is still in the early stages of development but it can solve a lot of problems in the future.
The Hashgraph technology solves the Byzantine Generals’ Problem without using any costly consensus like Proof-of-Work(PoW) which is really a big achievement at all.
“What if anyone on Earth, at any moment, could just wave their hand and carve out a world of their own in cyberspace?”
– Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, DR. LEEMON BAIRD
3 Characteristics Of Hashgraph
Here are some important characteristics of the Hashgraph given below:
- Fast: Hashgraph uses a gossip protocol that makes it incredibly very fast with a very high throughput of thousands of transactions per second. It provides low-latency transactions where transaction can be broadcasted in just a few seconds.
- Secure: Hashgraph uses the asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant (ABFT) consensus algorithm with timestamps and a virtual voting system that provides it incredibly very powerful security where there is no chance for the DDoS and Sybil attacks.
- Fair: Hashgraph works in a fair way where we get fairness in the timestamps and transaction orders that can’t be manipulated by malicious nodes. It provides a fair access to information and events.
- Immutable: The transaction data on the hashgraph is irreversible and unchangeable. Every transaction that occurred on hashgraph is permanently recorded on it and can never be corrupted in any way.
- Stable: Run on a reliable network governed by term-limited enterprises with no authorized forks, and the ability to meet global data regulations.
- Distributed: It is distributed public ledger where everyone can access the data of the public ledger and this public ledger containing all the transaction data is distributed throughout the internet in the digital world.
- Low Cost: Hashgraph is using a gossip protocol that makes it very cheap to run the network at low cost and there is no high-cost consensus required in hashgraph like Proof of Work (PoW) and no mining at all.
- Scalable: Hashgraph has high throughput (thousands of transactions per second) and provides good security at a low cost. Also, it is very fast, stable and fair and can be used for micro-payments that make it more useful and more scalable than any other existing DLT technologies like blockchain.
