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?”
The HCS allows for the creation of verifiable timestamps for transactions on a distributed ledger. This can be used, for example, by stock markets to record the precise times of bids and asset transfers. The HCS whitepaper, released in June 2019, was co-authored by IBM, a member of the Hedera Governing Council.
Hedera’s public distributed ledger allows developers to build their own application networks (appnet), a set of computers that 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 including Hyperledger Fabric, Corda, or Ethereum.
HCS Use-Cases
More examples of how companies might utilize HCS include:
- Asset tracking across a supply chain.
- Music stream counts to determine remittance for digital rights management.
- Auditable logs for asset transfers.
- Payable events across an advertising platform.
“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.”
– Leemon Baird, Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Hedera Hashgraph
The availability of the HCS comes following open access to 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.
Last week, Hedera partnered with Armanino for audited HBAR account data and earlier this week Hedera expanded its relationship with Gooogle Cloud by selecting the service as its preferred provider for its public testnets and the Hedera Consensus Service ecosystem.