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.

Shaping DLT adoption

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.’

Broad representation

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, explained ‘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.’ Other initial governing council members include Deutsche Telekom, Magazine Luiza, Nomura Holdings, and Swisscom Blockchain AG.