In 2013, Vitalik Buterin and his team of developers captured the attention of the media when they revealed their invention of a new blockchain that would rival that of Bitcoin. In July 2015, the first block on the blockchain, known as the “Genesis Block,” was laid – marking the official start of the Ethereum platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the novelty and surging prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum generated widespread public interest, an American computer scientist was quietly working on his own distributed ledger that would be presented as an alternative to the blockchain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The new technology, called a hashgraph, was described in its 2018 white paper as a project where carefully regulated nodes on the network “gossip” with each other about shared transactions, and which ultimately come to validate data through a consensus mechanism that eliminates the need for the blockchain’s<\/a> proof-of-work (PoW) system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Table of Contents<\/p>\n