Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed public ledger platform headquartered in Dallas, Texas, announced that it has completed a new round of financing of US$100 million. Investors include a group of institutional investors such as BlockTower Capital and high-net-worth individuals. The company received an $18 million venture capital round in March this year from Danhua Capital, Digital Currency Group and PV Ventures.

It is reported that this financing is carried out through the "Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT)", which aims to create a new business network for the "Hashgraph Consensus" technology launched by Hedera Hashgraph. According to the company, the "hashgraph consensus" can support faster, safer and larger-scale on-chain transactions than current blockchain technology.

According to the company's CEO, Mance Harmon, hashgraph consensus is a major advancement in the field of distributed systems. In the past, small blockchain systems have achieved the goal of distributed ledgers, but they have been unable to break through the bottleneck of scale. Bitcoin is more secure, but it doesn't perform as well in terms of transaction processing - this may be a trade-off that the designers originally hoped to achieve, and what hashgraph does is to break this trade-off and maximize security and business processing performance.

This means that Hedera Hashgraph's "hashgraph consensus" can be used as the basis of a cryptocurrency blockchain, which can run at a speed of hundreds of thousands of transactions per second in a single computer cluster (that is, a shard). This compares to five transactions per second for Bitcoin and 15 for Ethereum. Mance Harmon said,If enough clusters (shards) are allowed in parallel, the performance can reach millions of transactions per second, which is enough to handle large-scale commercial transactions.

Hedera Hashgraph provides a new way of collaboration to achieve "distributed consensus", allowing people who do not know each other or people who know and trust each other to verify transactions without the participation of "trusted intermediaries" like banks .

Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum use a "proof-of-work" algorithm, which, while making the cryptocurrency more secure, can take longer to reach consensus, thus slowing down blockchain processing and transactions will also be slower. Although workload authentication is not necessary in a closed network, it does mean that security needs to be sacrificed.

Hedera Hashgraph's "Hashgraph Consensus" does not require a computationally intensive workload authentication algorithm, but uses something called a "Virtual Voting Consensus Algorithm", eliminating the cumbersome operation of workload authentication, and the running speed becomes very fast. Mance Harmon said,Hedera Hashgraph aims to process transactions at least 1000 times faster than other cryptocurrencies.In addition, this new "hashgraph consensus" can also achieve high-throughput transactions for online games and verify the authenticity of resources.

Hedera Hashgraph's next step is to launch the "Hedera" network, and start early access to some partners starting next month, and develop distributed applications (DApps) based on the platform.

The “hashgraph consensus” technology that Hedera Hashgraph relies on is the brainchild of former U.S. Air Force Academy computer science professor Leemon Baird, now the company’s chief scientist. In addition to the US$100 million raised this time, Hedera Hashgraph revealed that it will raise another US$20 million through the sale of digital tokens. Of course, this financing transaction will be conducted in the form of private placement in full compliance with the regulations of the US Securities and Exchange Commission.