Hedera is a public distributed ledger and governing body built from the ground-up to support new and existing applications running at web scale. Developers use distributed ledger technologies to build computational trust directly into their applications. This allows individuals and businesses who might not know or trust each other to quickly and inexpensively collaborate. Public distributed ledgers allow for creating and exchanging value, proving identity, verifying and authenticating important data, and much more. Hedera is unique in that it achieves the same result as the most ubiquitous public blockchains (such as Bitcoin or Ethereum), but in a way that is faster, fairer, and more energy efficient, stable, and secure — these advantages can be attributed to the underlying hashgraph consensus algorithm and the global enterprise governing body, which owns and operates Hedera today. Hedera is governed by the Hedera Governing Council: An expert council consisting of 39 leading global enterprises and organizations, distributed across up to 11 different industries and spanning a wide range of geographies. The Governing Council makes key decisions over software upgrades, network pricing, treasury management, and more. Governing Council members are term-limited and do not receive any profits from Hedera.
