Kuwait-based Zain Group joins Hedera Governing Council

Publicly listed mobile telecom company Zain Group has become the first Middle Eastern firm to join Hedera Hashgraph’s governing council.

Zain Group is listed on the Kuwait Boursa and serves 49.5 million customers in eight markets across the Middle East and Africa.

It joins the likes of Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, Google, IBM and University College London as well as the recently reported LG Electronics.

Through its participation on the Hedera Council, Zain Group will gain extensive early insights into the trends and applications in the distributed ledger technology (DLT) space and will be able to assess opportunities to develop services within its own field of operation.

The Hedera Hashgraph patented technology platform addresses the universally important issue of the environment as its power usage is super-efficient, utilising a fraction of the electricity that blockchain platforms use.

This is in line with Zain Group’s membership of and commitment to the Carbon Disclosure Project, which provides a reporting framework and guidance to address climate change.

Zain Vice-Chairman and Group CEO, Bader Al Kharafi commented: “We feel a sense of purpose in joining the Hedera Governing Council, which has numerous blue chip, innovation-driven organisations all interested in driving the development of blockchains and the wider DLT space, which we have already noted has phenomenal potential.”

He continued: “From our own perspective, the growing list of new services and applications we have and continue to develop in areas such as the Group API platform; mobile money and fintech; e-health; drones; the Internet of Things; and 5G all lend themselves to further enhancement through blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies.”

Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera added: “We are delighted to have Zain Group join the Council, given the company’s sound track record of innovation, and professionalism in the development and delivery of cutting-edge mobile services and applications.

“We hope Zain will take full advantage of the opportunity to immerse itself in hashgraph and distributed ledger technologies and gain first-hand knowledge of new technologies and use cases developed on the Hedera network.”

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