HBAR Token Hits Record High as IIT Madras Joins Hedera’s Governing Council

Blockchain-like public network Hedera’s HBAR token rallied for the fifth straight day on Wednesday, topping 50 cents for the first time and taking the month-to-date gain to 105%.

At press time, the token is trading 13% higher on the day at 56 cents, per Messari.

The rally comes a day after the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, one of the top tech schools globally, joined Hedera’s governing council to drive research and development in the distributed ledger technology (DLT) space.

The rotating governing council of up to 39 members includes the likes of IBM, Tata Communication, Boeing, London School of Economics, and decentralized finance oracle Chainlink. Each one of them runs a node, enabling decentralized governance of the Hedera public ledger.

While most other blockchains use proof-of-stake or proof-of-work consensus, Hedera describes itself as the only public distributed ledger that uses the “Hashgraph” consensus to process significantly more transactions than its peers.

Hashgraph uses a gossip protocol to send information between network nodes and reach a consensus on transactions. The process appears analogous to the way a virus spreads randomly across communities going by the official explainer below:

“Alice will choose another member [node] at random, such as Bob, and then Alice will tell Bob all of the information she knows so far. Alice then repeats with a different random member. Bob repeatedly does the same, and all other members do the same. In this way, if a single member becomes aware of new information, it will spread exponentially fast through the community until every member is aware of it.”

Essentially, transactions do not form blocks, and information travels faster across nodes.

Hedera Hashgraph recently received validation from the University College London (UCL) for having the lowest energy consumption compared with Algorand, Cardano, Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, and Tezos. Further, it has joined forces with decentralized storage network Filecoin to advance the interoperability of Web3. The partnership announced in late July rolled out an initial grant of $200,000 for NFT use cases with a long-term vision of supporting a range of distributed ledger solutions, including distributed consensus, storage, and smart data applications.

Further, crypto exchanges KuCoin and Crypto.com listed HBAR on Sept. 14, exposing the token to millions of potential investors.

The steady stream of positive newsflow may have helped HBAR scale record highs. The cryptocurrency has gained 65% and ranks second on the list of the best performing smart contract platform coins of the past seven days, per Messari.

Native tokens of several smart contract platforms, including SOL, AVAX, and FTM, have rallied by 150% in the past 30 days, thanks to the boom in the non-fungible tokens space and the congestion on Ethereum blockchain.