Amid a flurry of announcements from Hashgraph, the technology and innovation arm behind the Hedera network, we sat down with CEO Eric Piscini at Paris Blockchain Week to hear more about the company, its plans for the future and his thoughts cybersecurity in the digital assets space.
CP: What’s the secret behind Hedera’s success?
EP: From the beginning, we said the network is going to be operated, managed and governed by large, well-known organisations which will to give credibility to the project. Today, we have all Fortune 2000 companies on our council, including Google, IBM and Dell so it’s a unique organisation structure.
Another key factor is that all our transaction fees are in USD. Typically, in the crypto space, transaction fees are all in crypto, but this can create real issues when the value fluctuates so much. When you’re doing thousands of transactions a day, and you don’t have clarity on how much you’ll have to spend in transaction fees day to day because the value of the currency is volatile, it’s very difficult to scale.
Finally, the network is set up to make front running impossible, which makes it very attractive to capital market banks and other businesses.
CP: Why is cybersecurity a focal point for the company at the moment?
EP: Since Hedera launched it has been the adult in the room, broadly. We’ve always had a focus on the right regulation, complying with the right standards and bringing the right solutions to market. We have a very strong technical team working on our security internally and we have just partnered with Halborn, a leading blockchain security firm, to strengthen security measures and protections across the Hedera ecosystem.
CP: How do ESG responsibilities fit into the company’s ethos?
EP: The technology is very safe, and it’s also very green. Part of our brand is focused on ensuring that we consume very little energy to run the network.
In the next few years, we’re going to see a lot of requirements from financial institutions around ensuring that their financial instruments are not impact the planet in a negative way. Not necessarily in the form of a specific certification but they will want assurances that we can provide already.
From a business perspective, being green also allows us to scale more easily. If you run platform that consumes a massive amount of electricity it becomes very expensive to run very quickly as you try to grow, and if it’s too expensive then no one is going to use it.
CP: What do you think is next for the crypto industry?
EP: We’re going to start talking less about crypto itself and more about the value that the technology provides. The value in this industry is around giving institutions the ability to serve their clients better by offering transactions and payments in real time, and giving investors the opportunity to invest in assets and instruments that they don’t have access to today. Over the next few years, we’re going to see a huge slate of services offered to every person on the planet, whether they have a bank account or not.
