CIO & LEADER-Issue-01-April 2018 (1)

COLUMN
By Mohua Sengupta
Is Hashgraph
the Technology
of the Future?
It definitely addresses critical
challenges that Blockchain has
been grappling with
T
The author is EVP & Global Head of
Services, 3i Infotech Ltd.
The most popular questions in the
technology world today is most
definitely the one on whether
Hashgraph is better than Blockchain.
The life and credibility of the
Blockchain is being questioned and
Hashgraph is being predicted as the
technology of the future.
While it is difficult to predict whether
Blockchain is a thing of the past
and whether Hashgraph is the final
answer, one thing is sure, Hashgraph
definitely addresses a lot of the critical
challenges that Blockchain has been
grappling with, the challenge of speed
of processing, the challenge of fairness,
and the huge challenge of requiring
multiple industry regulators to
come together.
Hashgraph can process 250000+
transactions per second as opposed
to Blockchain’s 7 transactions per second.
Hashgraph is fast because it uses
Gossip protocol to spread messages to
the network and also performs some
optimization of the gossiped messages
to reduce the communication
overhead. One other reason behind
this speed of Hashgraph is because
Hashgraph today uses private, permissioned
networks.
Coming to fairness, the main challenge
of Blockchain is its dependence
on miners. There could be forking
and delay because of the actions of the
miners, who can manipulate the process.
Since Hashgraph is based on consensus
and time stamping, it’s faster
and more accurate. The Virtual Voting
Consensus Algorithm of Hashgraph,
which was invented by Dr. Leemon
Baird, makes it straightforward to
know how a node would vote and this
data can be used as an input to the voting
algorithm and to find whichever
transactions have reached consensus
quickly, thus making it more fair.
I feel that one of the biggest challenges
for Blockchain to be a commonly
used technology, is the need
for multiple industry regulators to
come together and set regulations
which will cut across industries. As I
have said before, a Blockchain, or for
8 CIO&LEADER | April 2018