Jay: Today’s show guest is Mance Harmon, CEO and cofounder of Hashgraph. The Hedera Hashgraph platform aims to be a superior alternative to blockchain by being faster, fairer, and more secure. Hedera Hashgraph has the ability to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. By comparison, Bitcoin typically processes less than ten transactions per second, and Ethereum usually processes less than 25. Mance, welcome to the show.

Mance: Thank you. I appreciate you having me.

Jay: I’m very excited, actually, to have you on. It’s really incredible the technology that you guys are working on. Before we dive in to all the good stuff, I’d love to get an introduction of you. So maybe you could give us some background and just some sort of personal color for the audience so they can have a better understanding of where you come from.

Mance: I’m happy to. Leemon Baird and I — Leemon, of course, is the inventor of hashgraph, the algorithm. He and I have been working together for 25 years. We actually met when we were young officers in the U.S. Air Force. We were doing basic research in machine learning for the Air Force senior scientists for machine intelligence. And so our formal background going way back is in machine learning and AI and neural networks, today, what people call deep learning — we didn’t call it that back then — but deep learning equivalent. We both taught computer science at the Air Force Academy. I was a course director for cyber security. I managed a massive software program for the Missile Defense Agency in the United States. Basically, we created a massive simulator that allows the government and its allies to learn how to protect its citizens and allies from incoming nuclear ballistic missiles. I ran that for a while.

Then we decided to become entrepreneurs. And so I left for military, and we started our first company, and it was in the space of identity. And we sold that to a Fortune 500. I served as a senior execute for product security in that organization before we started our second company and our second startup, again, in the space of identity. Ran that for six and a half years and sold it to private equity.

Then the story begins to become a little bit more relevant to what we’re doing today. I went to work for another identity company, a mainstream identity vendor, Ping Identity, as the head of labs and architecture. Leemon went to work in 2012 on this problem of trying to devise a distributed consensus algorithm that is both secure and scalable. All of this really started in 2012. In 2015, he had this major breakthrough. Today, that’s what we call the hashgraph. And Ping Identity decided to invest in the company that Leemon and I decided to create. And now here we are, three years later, and a lot has changed since then.

Jay: That’s a great introduction. Thanks for sharing that with us. It sounds like you’re obviously a very seasoned entrepreneur. I feel like, just by hearing what your track and your path that you and Leemon took, I’m happy that this sort of technology now is very much in the mainstream. And maybe it’s not necessarily for the right reasons. I think the crypto explosion has definitely sort of put everything in the spotlight. Nonetheless, I’m glad that it is out there. It’s exciting what you guys are working on.

Just quickly, our audience is from various backgrounds of technical ability. I certainly am not technically that savvy. But I think if we could maybe, as we begin the discussion of hashgraph, if you could sort of walk us through, on layman-type terms… You mention that your partner, Leemon, is working on this problem of distributed ledger technology or distributed consensus at scale. Maybe we can start there and tell us about what exactly was he trying to accomplish that sent him off on this journey in 2012.

Mance: I’m happy to. By 2012, the internet had sort of grown up in some fundamental ways. There were significantly-sized, giant tech companies. The tech giants is what we call them today. The tech giants existed, and a lot of the internet had sort of become centralized in those tech giants. And the social applications, the business applications that we use, they all primarily are run in a central server managed and owned by a single organization. And the rest of us are at the mercy of those companies that run these massive product offerings today, the SaaS apps that we have today.

And what Leemon wanted to achieve was the ability to change the computing model for the internet. And so today we have a central server and a bunch of clients that run on your computers and smartphones that connect to those central servers. Leemon wanted to make it so that there was no central server. And basically, practically, what that would mean is he envisioned a world where we — our friends and our business colleagues — can carve out a piece of cyberspace. And in that piece of cyberspace, we run business applications that allow us to engage in business functions and commerce — the buying and selling of goods and services together — or makes it possible for us to play our games together without there being a central server and without having to entrust our data and our privacy with the operator of that central server.

And so that was the vision. The vision was to literally change the way the internet works, fundamentally, so that we, as consumers, are more protected than what we are today.

What’s interesting is that here we are six years later, and the problems that Leemon predicted would come about way back then and even earlier than that, we now even have a name for them. We call that business model surveillance capitalism, where you have a tech giant that is collecting information about its users and then monetizing that, often, to the detriment of the consumer.

So it’s all of that that Leemon wanted to change. He, of course, knew what was going on in the world of distributed consensus. He knew about Bitcoin and blockchain, although he recognized from the very beginning that blockchain, as a technology, would never be able to achieve the vision that he had. You had to have a fundamentally different approach that was far more performant. And, if we were going to have this type of infrastructure, then we had to make it as secure as possible from the very beginning, not repeat the mistakes that were made when the internet was growing up the first time, where identity and security were sort of afterthoughts, but build in the very best security from the very beginning in the algorithm that is the underpinning of this new economy and new internet that was envisioned.

And so that’s been Leemon’s vision from day one. That’s the vision of our company. It’s all about changing the way the world works to the benefit of those that use the internet, and that’s all of us, of course.

Jay: That’s really interesting, because, as you say, it’s exactly what is basically manifesting now, especially with the Facebook stuff that’s happening and all these internet giants. It’s interesting because unless you’re in that space or a visionary, as you guys were or Leemon was, you wouldn’t be able to see or foresee that that would happen. I don’t think anyone at the time, the consumer, really care about that. They were just happy that they could get on the internet and all these cool, new applications. They didn’t really think twice about the data that they were giving up and what the negative potential ramifications of that would be. It’s quite interesting that it’s starting to unravel now.

Now, just to have some clarity, I know that you guys were at one point — or you may be still — were working on blockchain solutions for private enterprises. Is that right?

Mance: Yeah. This is actually an important point. Hashgraph — just to talk about terms for a moment — hashgraph is an algorithm. There is no company called hashgraph, but we have two companies that use hashgraph, the algorithm. The first one was Swirlds — and this is what you’re referring to. Swirlds we incorporated back in Q4 of 2015, and Swirlds went to market to address permission use cases, private networks for enterprises. We did that first because we knew that it was going to be required to realize our vision of how a public network should work. Late last year, we got enough market validation behind us and enough software developed and maturity in the company that we decided it was time to go ahead and begin working on a public network. But those are very different markets. They’re very different business models.

And so we spun out a separate organization that is Hedera Hashgraph. So there’s Swirlds that still exists today and still addresses enterprise use cases for permission networks. And there’s Hedera Hashgraph, which is the company that is chartered with creating the public network, the public infrastructure built on the hashgraph algorithm.

So, yes, to answer your question directly, we continue working on the enterprise stuff in Swirlds, and Hedera is focused on public.

Jay: Perfect. So thanks for clarifying that. I think we should tackle the hashgraph algorithm and why that is superior to blockchain. Before we dig into that, if you could help us and the audience clearly define blockchain because you obviously have expertise in that. And then you can compare and contrast that to the hashgraph algorithm and then explain why it’s actually superior. Sorry, that’s a big ask of you.

Mance: No, that’s fine. Maybe the place to start, if it’s alright with you, is just to talk about the fundamentals, the roots of the industry in total, even prior to 2008.

Jay: Right. I would love that. Yes.

Mance: This whole industry is about making it possible to have a replicated database in a way that was not foreseen or possible prior to 2008. So we go way back. Databases have been around for decades, obviously. And the notion has been that there’s a single organization that is running one database or even a cluster of databases. If you have a cluster of databases, like Amazon has its bookstore, for example — it’s much broader than books today — but Amazon has its database. It’s not just a single database. There are a bunch of databases that Amazon is running, and they are all replicated. Or many of them will be replicated, meaning that there are identical copies of the same information. And when people use Amazon’s services, they may hit any one of those databases. You’ll have multiple users, some of which are making changes to database instance A and some making changes to database instance B.

Occasionally, different users will change the same location in instance A and in instance B, and when that happens, that’s called a right conflict. And there has to be some way of resolving that. Which one came first? There are consensus algorithms for exactly that purpose. It’s for the community of databases, in this case, to come to agreement on which right transaction happened first. They all agree, and they all commit the changes to the databases, their instances in the same order. And that’s how you keep the databases in sync.

Fundamentally, that’s what this industry is all about. The difference today between what we had historically is that Amazon would never have dreamed of giving Google an instance — instance C — of its books database for Google to run. That never would cross their mind. And if you want to do something like that, if you want to give a different party an instance of your database to run, then there are a set of security concerns that you have to worry about.

What 2008 and Bitcoin and Satori demonstrated for the first time is that it’s possible to give those instances away to different legal entities, to different individuals, some of which may be competitive to you — maybe you don’t even know who they are — and you could have hundreds or thousands of these database instances being run by a large group of parties, and you can do it securely. And that’s fundamentally the difference between what we had before and what we now have today.

Blockchain is just one way, the first way, that we discovered to achieve this replicated database across multiple parties in a secure way. Fundamentally, blockchain as a term refers to two things. It refers to a data structure which is this chain of blocks of transactions, and these transactions, you can sort of mentally envision as being the right transactions to the local database and conceptually. And so it’s linear. It’s this chain of blocks of transactions.

And then blockchain as a term also refers to a consensus algorithm, a way for the community to come to agreement about which block goes on top of the chain. Hashgraph is different in that it’s not a chain. It’s a graph. And that’s just sort of a mathematical term, but what it means practically is that, instead of the community coming to an agreement on which block to put on this single linear chain, each member of community, in our case, when they have a transaction, they don’t have to wait and put it in blocks or wait for one party to solve a hard crypto puzzle and publish a block that the community considers to put on top of the chain. Individuals that are nodes in the network, they just submit these transactions to the network whenever they want, at will, without anything slowing them down. And then hashgraph represents this data structure, a graph, that’s cryptographically secure using hashes, and a consensus algorithm, a way of the community to take the transactions that are flowing into and represented by this data structure, to put them in order so that we all have the same common understanding of transaction order.

Because we’re not a chain and we’re a graph, and because of some other properties that we have, we have fantastic performance, and at the same time, we have the best security that one can achieve in this field of distributed consensus.

Jay: Right. That is a very… Actually, the example that you gave of Amazon, that’s a very succinct and concise way of explaining that. So I appreciate that.

Now, I know that you’ve spoken before about four public ledger requirement areas. And in each of these areas, hashgraph and the technology that you guys have created is far superior to the blockchain technology. Just to run down this list, you talk about technology, security, stability, and governance. Maybe if you could just spend a few moments elaborating on each of those four, I think that would also be helpful.

Mance: I’m happy to. Going years back, we were thinking about what will it take to get mainstream market adoption of these public networks. We, simply by observation, could see some of the serious bottlenecks to that adoption. As you point out, the four categories that we came up with, the first being technology… When you consider that the current generation of public networks can only process in the single digits or tens of transactions per second, there is just not that much you can do at five transactions per second or at 15 transactions per second. And the use cases that are being proposed are sort of constrained by the performance. If the performance weren’t that low, then the range of what you can do in terms of applications could be much broader.

And so we recognize from the beginning, we need to move from where we are today to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. And that would be the equivalent of moving, basically, from a calculator to a full computer. That’s the leap that we’re looking for. Obviously, there are far more things that you can do with a computer than you can do with a calculator. And that’s what we’ve achieved in hashgraph.

In hashgraph, we do expect, when we launch the public network formally, to have hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. We’re already demonstrating that. There is a white paper online that people can download to look at the specific results and software that can be downloaded to replicate those results yourself, if that’s of interest.

And so there is performance, and then there is security. We recognize that if it’s the case that the world economy, in some ways, will be fundamentally changed by these platforms and these platforms are going to process hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of dollars of value, then they’re going to be targeted for attack. Everyone should just expect that to happen. If that’s going to happen and we know it’s going to happen, then we didn’t want to settle for the status quo — that being attackers find a problem with the code base; the protocol designers patched the hole; the attackers find a countermeasure and find a way around the patch; the protocol designers do a counter-countermeasure… It’s an arms race back and forth.

What we wanted was to fundamentally eliminate vectors of attack at the algorithm level so that we don’t enter the arms race in the first place, and we make it impossible for the attackers to attack us in certain ways — practically impossible. And so that’s asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant. That’s the best that one can achieve in the field of distributed consensus. Theoretically, it’s well understood what this means. What we’ve done is demonstrated, for the first time, that we can achieve that level of security, asynchronous BFT, at scale. And that’s part of the value prop. Prior to this point, going back 30 years, ABFT had been demonstrated but only for very small numbers of nodes, and that was it.

So there is technology and performance and security. Then stability. We’re computer scientists. I have a couple of degrees in comp sci. Leemon is a PhD is comp sci. We’ve spent out entire lives in the field of computer science, and we deeply appreciate the value that open-source brings to the community and the market. At the same time, we recognized that open source combined with a cryptocurrency is a fundamentally different animal than what we’ve seen in the past.

And what has happened and continues to happen is when a business manager, an enterprise business manager, is considering whether they want to spend, say, $2 million to build an enterprise application on top of a public platform, they stop and think, “I know that platform is very likely to fork, hard fork, into a competing platform and competing cryptocurrency in the future. And not just me. Everybody knows this.” It’s common knowledge. This is going to happen. That represents business risk. There can be really bad things that happen to your application that’s running on top of these platforms. If your application state is split with the platform, all of sudden, you now have an application running on two different platforms, and the client software that uses those gets confused. And if you’ve invested in a currency or the cryptocurrency because you’re going to be using those platforms, now the value of that currency is directly impacted because the currency itself, the number of tokens, has been doubled in some sense. So there are bad things that can happen. And it’s because everything is pure open source.

So what we did was we made a decision at the very beginning to patent hashgraph. And for years, people asked us, “Why did you patent hashgraph?” Now we’re really able to tell the world our plans for this public network. We did this. We launched it in March, and here’s why we have a patent.

We want to maintain the good parts of open source, meaning open innovation. There’s no license that’s required to use the platform, but just because we have a patent doesn’t mean that you have to sign a license agreement with us and license the technology. That’s not the case. You just use the platform, just like Ethereum or any of the other platforms.

So there is no license required, and with version one of the platform, we’re going to release the software, so it will be open. It will be public. Anybody can look at it. So it’s not a black box. It’s not hidden in any way. So people will be able to look at it and propose changes and identify bugs and report those. That sort of thing.

But we’re using the patent to make a promise, a guarantee to the market for the first time that this public ledger will never fork. We’re bringing stability to the ledger, to this community, that hasn’t existed previously.

Now, we also recognize that there will be developers that just don’t like this. There are developers that will want to know that if they don’t like the direction we take the platform — they don’t like the product roadmap, for example, of the platform — then they’re going to want to fork that platform and go off and do their own thing and compete. I can certainly appreciate that sentiment 100%. But I think that there are a large number of developers in the market that will never do that. They have no interest in trying to modify the consensus platform itself and go stand up another competing network. All they care about is having a stable public platform that is well-managed, well-governed, and has that behind it, and they know it’s going to be stable. That’s what offer, for the first time, to the market.

So there are four categories — the technology, the security, the stability, and finally is the governance model. The question is, how can we build a governing body that is the most decentralized governing body of any of the public platforms? We want a governing body that represents all interests, all constituencies, and not just for a given geography but globally. And not just for a given business like the banks, for example, but for all sectors, all the major sectors.

So what we’ve done is we’ve decided to create a council of 39 members. These are the largest organizations in the world — big enterprise. They each represent tens of billions in the market cap individually. They have the best brands, the most trusted brands in the world. They have global expertise in their industry, and they cross 18 sectors of business. So again, this is not just a bunch of banks. There will be three, maybe four banks total on the council. But there will be tech giants. There will be insurance companies and transportation companies and telcos and retail and on and on and on — 18 sectors of business. And they’re not in the United States. There will be some in the United States, but there are members today in the U.S, in Australia, in Asia, in Europe, also in India. What we remain to pick up is Middle East, Africa, and South America, and I’m certain that we will pick up members from each of those regions shortly.

And so, by design, we’ve created a governing body that represents all those interests. And the governing body helps to manage the organization through an oversight function. You can sort of think of them as a board of directors, and they provide expertise into all the major parts of the business. The finance committee will have global experts in economics and in finance, helping us to make the right decisions. And the tech steering committee will have expertise from the tech giants in building this global platform. Legal and regulatory — we’ll have oversight from some of the world’s largest law firms, global law firms, to help us navigate those legal waters and the legal intricacies by jurisdiction, that sort of thing.

So it’s designed to be the most decentralized. When you think about it and you compare this to all the other platforms in the market today, by comparison, I think we’ve achieved that goal. For some of the public platforms, there are core developers that are primarily responsible. Maybe the miners are helping to influence the organization in that way. Maybe there is a foundation with a half dozen members or a single company that has some number of owners. So by comparison, everything else I’ve seen is more centralized than our council is. And those are the four. So the four were technology, security, stability, and governance.

And then finally, the last piece of this in terms of decentralization is just the technology itself. Who is voting? What are the nodes that are voting on the order of transactions? And we think that, again, we’ve got the most decentralized platform in the market. There are no leader nodes or master nodes. There are no coordinators. There are no super nodes or witnesses that all the stake is being given to, and it’s a small group to vote on the order of transactions… Every node in the network is on par with every other node in the network. It’s the same software. It’s the same voting process. They’re all the same.

At scale — meaning, a fully chartered solution with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of nodes in the network, it will absolutely be the most decentralized or distributed technical solution in the market.

Jay: That’s very interesting and a very good overview of those four ledger requirements. So to sort of recap, obviously the technology and the security of hashgraph, you guys are aiming for that to be far superior to the blockchain and that sort of technology that exists today. Stability, now you guys have a patented technology. So for the first time, developers and people that are building on top of hashgraph won’t have to worry about a group of developers just running off and forking it and trying to do their own thing. And obviously, as you mentioned, you can’t please everyone. I imagine there will be some extreme libertarian-type programmers that are against this sort of thing. But nonetheless, as an overall, from a stability standpoint, that does provide something that has never existed before.

And then I really like the governance part because I think people can kind of equate it, like you said, to a board of directors to make sure that it’s a global oversight committee to make sure that everyone’s best interests are at the forefront.

As we piece this together and get a better understanding of hashgraph, I basically see it much clearer now. As far as use cases that can be built on top of this platform, obviously, because it’s just the underlying technology, I’m sure there’s multiple things that can be built on top. Are there a few things right out of the gates that you guys have already built? Is there a cryptocurrency that you have or digital asset, if you will, that you are planning to release when hashgraph goes open to the public?

Mance: That’s right. There are three initial services that are running on top of hashgraph, the consensus algorithm, in this public network. The first three are cryptocurrency with native support for micropayments. I’ll come back to that.

The second one is distributed file storage. It’s what we call Byzantine. So it’s Byzantine file storage. What that means practically is that when a developer or an application stores information in this distributed file store, it gets proof back that the file has actually been stored. But maybe even more importantly than that, when the file is deleted from the distributed file storage, it gets an assertion proof back from the community that the file has, in fact, been deleted. And that’s important for privacy concerns and GDPR — all of these. There are a lot of reasons where you want to know information has actually been removed. So we have a Byzantine file storage system that’s distributed.

And then, finally, number three is smart contracts. What we’ve done to be backward compatible with what’s in the industry already is we’ve taken the Ethereum Virtual Machine that is running Solidity — it’s executing Solidity scripts — and we’ve put that directly on top of our platform. So all of those Solidity scripts that have been developed by Ethereum developers — or I should just say generally Solidity developers in the market — should work out of the box on our platform. So those are the three initial services running on the platform.

In terms of the first application, just the cryptocurrency service with native support for micro-transactions… Let me explain what I mean when I say “native support for micro-transactions.” The whole community, the whole world, understands the value of — at least in our industry, I’ll caveat… In our industry, people understand the value of micro-payments, the ability to pay, for example, a thousandth of a penny to somebody and do so economically. It doesn’t make sense for me to pay you a thousandth of a cent if it costs a dollar to complete the transaction. That just doesn’t work. And of course, that’s where we are with Bitcoin today. So the industry has been looking for ways to enable micropayments. And the ways that have been proposed to date have been done or accomplished by adding an additional layer on top that’s less secure and doesn’t really achieve the vision of what we achieved initially by doing all of this in a distributed, consensus way.

What we have is the ability to pay a thousandth of a penny — or even a millionth of a penny — with a transaction, do so economically without adding all of that other infrastructure. It just happens directly on the graph. The reason this is important is because micro-payments as a technology or a capability enables entirely new business models. And the one that I like to use because people can sort of viscerally appreciate very quickly… Every January, if you use Wikipedia, when you go to Wikipedia in January, you normally get the banner across the top, and it asks for you to donate $3 or $6. And I do that. I support the Wikimedia Foundation through my charitable contributions.

If we had a web browser with an embedded cryptocurrency, a wallet that holds cryptocurrency, then when I browse Wiki articles, the browser should recognize the cost of reading a Wiki article and just seamlessly, transparently transfer a thousandth of a penny from my wallet to the Wikimedia Foundation’s wallet, and all of a sudden, they now have a sustainable revenue model, probably far more revenue than they’re getting today through charitable contributions. And I’m happy to pay it. People generally are happy to pay for services and product that they find of value. And this is just one example of how we can use micropayments as a capability to enable new business models that change the way the world works.

So I think that micropayments out of the box are a really big deal. Also, when you have this kind of performance that we have, you can begin to think about other things like ad tech. There’s a lot of click fraud in the marketplace today. There are a lot of companies out there that are talking about building distributed marketplaces for ad space and combining those that have ad space with those that want to purchase it and provide provenance information of the clicks so that you begin to reduce click fraud in the industry. And that requires, minimally, hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

If you think about the world of IoT, the Internet of Things, I think that for the world of IoT to ever realize its full potential, there has to be a distributed marketplace of things, services, and the ability for things — of course, when I say “things,” I’m referring here to computers like your light bulb or your washing machine or your car — to discover services provided by other things, negotiate pricing, or participate in a marketplace, and then pay for those services using a cryptocurrency. And when you think about a global things, services, directory, we definitely want that on a distributed platform. We don’t want a single company running that massive services directory. And you need a cryptocurrency to enable it.

There are just a lot of different — some of which are future…a lot of different applications, sort of forward-looking, that a real distributed platform with the services that we’re providing at the performance that we’re providing can begin to realize for the very first time.

Jay: So it really does sound like a new and improved version of…from all the different ledger requirements and characteristics versus blockchain currently. So I’m just curious, Mance, as someone that is clearly well into the technology space and has been working on these sort of solutions for a number of years, how do you foresee things playing out in the coming decade? Do you see a world where hashgraph co-exists with a lot of the other blockchain protocols? Or do you see… Obviously, there will be sort of a divergence to the best in breed. Do you see hashgraph kind of taking over? And is that the actual, ultimate vision of what you guys are working on?

Mance: Well, it’s a lot easier for me to say what I think will happen in terms of technologies as opposed to companies. Let me describe what I mean by that. Blockchain as a technology, I think, will diminish. Blockchain and the way that it’s implemented using proof of work with Bitcoin and the current version of Ethereum, etc., that’s on its way out. Ultimately, it will be replaced. So if we’re just looking at technology, hashgraph is better in every dimension than blockchain. No question about it in my mind.

It’s a lot harder to say what will happen in companies because companies can evolve. And the technology that they use under the hood can be changed. Sometimes it’s really had to accomplish. I think that Ethereum, right now, is struggling to make that transition. They very well may be successful in moving from where they are today to Casper. So that’s quite possible that they will be able to do that. But I think it’s going to be challenging. So it’s hard to say what will happen in terms of any given company.

What I can say is that I think these different public platforms with mature. And as the market matures, each platform will sort of take on a persona. One platform will be the platform that people sort of view as the platform for small and medium business and maybe the startup community, and perhaps a different platform is the platform that you use if you want enterprise-grade security and enterprise-grade performance. I think that hashgraph certainly will be viewed as the enterprise-grade platform in the market. And it very well may be used by most of the startup community as well. That all remains to be seen.

And then finally thought here… When we look at historically what’s happened, there are multiple players in any given category that grow up to be big tech giants and the mainstream companies that the internet is built on top of. I think, notably, it’s important to remember that both Microsoft and Apple still exist today. And they competed head to head for a lot of years, and they both are still around. Hedera Hashgraph, we clearly intend to be one of those companies.

Our intent is to build a 100-year company here. We’re not in this for the short-term. This is not a money grab or anything like that. We’re wanting to build the next generation infrastructure that’s around for 100 years.

Jay: That’s fantastic. On that note, where are you guys as far as releasing or developing and releasing something to the public? What are your time frames? Is there going to be… Obviously, this is, as you said, you’re building a 100-year company. This is not one of these ICO-flip type situations. But is there going to be an ICO? Or how are you going to offer your coin and this sort of thing? Anything exciting in the in the foreseeable future that you can talk with us about?

Mance: Sure. Two parts to this. One is the platform and the other one is the cryptocurrency. On the platform side of things, we will be feature complete this month. In fact, I need to check with my tech team. We may already be there. But this month, we will be feature complete. We already have our first partners, developers, that have applications they want to build on the platform. They will begin building those applications before the end of this month on the test networks, the private test networks to start. And then we will harden the platform through the summer and into the fall. And at the same time, we will broaden, very gradually, the range of partners that we allow onto the test network. And we’ll open those gates a little bit more broadly later in the fall and into Q4.

We also will go on the road with some hackathons. So we expect, over the summer, to be hosting lots of hackathons around the world. And developers that come in and participate in those hackathons will be able to use the main — I shouldn’t say “main net” — but the test network. The closed test network, they’ll get access to it and very likely will maintain access to that from that point forward. So it’s a big motivation to anybody that wants to use the test network to participate in these hackathons.

The goal is by the end of the year to have general availability to the platform. That’s our target. I expect that we’ll achieve it. But certainly no later than Q1 we’ll have general availability.

In terms of the cryptocurrency, we are domiciled in the United States. And, of course, what that means is that we have to be mindful of the regulatory concerns in the United States, specifically around the SEC. And so we are going through an institutional round of financing right now. And we will finish that off shortly. We expect to have an accredited crowd sale that will kick off sometime later in the summer with much lower minimums and maximums on the crowd sales. More of the general population will be able to just participate directly in that way.

And also, for the developer community, we are making it possible for them to help us test the network. Our thought is that if the developer community is given a set of tools they use to help us test the network and harden the network, then we turn around and we compensate them with tokens so that they can use those tokens when developing their own applications in the future, that’s another way of getting the tokens into the market before the end of the year.

So all of that is going on. I doubt seriously there is going to be a retail ICO. What would enable that, perhaps, is some clarity from the SEC, from a regulatory perspective. Frankly, I expect that we will get that clarity this year. I will be really surprised if we don’t have more clarity than we do today sometime in the coming months. And then we’ll react appropriately. If it’s possible to have a retail ICO, of course, we would love to do that. But we’re just going to have to react to what happens with the SEC.

Jay: That’s fantastic. Mance, it’s been such a pleasure speaking with you today. And thank you so much for not only your patience and your being articulate with the technology side of things but for sharing with us your vision of Hedera Hashgraph and all the wonderful things you guys are working on. What is the best place that people can find you or follow you or connect with you or maybe learn a little bit more about the exciting work you guys are working on?

Mance: To stay informed about Hedera Hashgraph in particular, we have a mailing list that you can subscribe to through hashgraph.com or HederaHashgraph.com. They both resolve to the same address, the same webpage. And there, on the contacts page, I believe, there is another location that you can register. If you have a particular interest, you can register your interest there. We have a Telegram channel — both a Telegram channel, and we have another channel — not on Telegram — but a Dev channel. And then we have a Medium site that we use for Hedera Hashgraph. I think those are probably the best.

Of course, I have a Twitter account that people can follow if that’s of interest. And sometimes I will publish things that are interesting to me in particular, both through Twitter and through my LinkedIn account. But from a company perspective, Hedera Hashgraph and its mailing list and Telegram channel are probably the best places to go.

Jay: Fantastic. We’ll make sure that we have that linked up in the show notes. Once again, Mance, it’s been such a pleasure and a very eye-opening type of learning experience for me as well, as I was reviewing for our chat today. And I’m sure the audience is going to get a lot out of this. also, we’re looking forward to seeing your progress and hearing good things about what your company is solving and achieving. Thanks again for your time. We really appreciate it, and we wish you the best of luck.

Mance: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate your interest and certainly the interest of those listening to the podcast. Thank you.

Jay: Thanks again. Take care.