Libra controversy: Hedera thanks Facebook for copying its blockchain model

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past week, you’ll be aware of the hoopla around Facebook Libra.

This being Mark Zuckerberg and company, not everyone is a fan. Take, for instance, blockchain venture Hedera which has taken a swipe at the social media giant in a Wall Street Journal ad.

“Thank you Facebook Libra. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” the ad, which features the Facebook thumbs up symbol, says, adding: “It’s been their internet for too long. Make it yours”.

In a blog post, Mance Harmon, CEO and Co-founder of Hedera, says: “The hardest part of starting a company is selling your vision to the world. Hedera was built on the belief that we could achieve both the network effects enabled by a fully decentralised public network and the stability brought about by enterprise governance. We put this idea into practice by combining the technical innovation of hashgraph’s fast, fair, and secure consensus algorithm with the Hedera Hashgraph Governing Council to form the Hedera public network.”

“When we announced the launch of Hedera in March 2018, many in the space viewed our plans for a council as very ambitious. We talked to some of the largest companies and investors in the world about this model. Some said we were crazy. Some said it would be too hard. The bravest have joined us in our journey. Including some of the best companies in the world,” he adds.

Facebook meeting

Harmon says that he sat down with David Marcus of Facebook in February 2018 and shared his company’s vision for Hedera, including the technology roadmap and the importance of a governing council. “Much of what we shared was echoed in Facebook’s Libra announcement this week, and that is a good thing for the market,” he comments. “Facebook has set some high table stakes, and we believe we have the right approach and the necessary technology to surpass those.”

Harmon goes on to emphasise his belief in a world “where people will carve out their piece of cyber space, not by giving up their data to gain free access to a social network service that exploits it, but by building and using the applications that deliver value to them, with privacy and security. Hedera is not going to change the world. But you — the developers building on us, the customers we serve, and those we enable to deliver services — certainly will.”

This summer, the Hedera Mainnet will be openly accessible to anyone that wants to use it. It will be governed by a growing council of organisations, and deliver “an unmatched combination of performance and security”.

Harmon concludes: “We will follow a clearly defined path from permissioned to fully permissionless, with a plan to have hundreds of thousands of globally distributed nodes at scale. We will support the next generation of consumer and enterprise applications. We will enable new kinds of applications combining the privacy of a private ledger with the full trust of a public ledger. We hope you’ll join us in building the internet everyone deserves.”

Facebook did not respond to our request for comment.