• T-Labs becomes initial governing member of the Hedera Hashgraph Governing Council
• Hedera’s distributed ledger technology enables people to securely collaborate and transact online
• Cooperation is part of T-Labs’ various blockchain research projects

Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs), Deutsche Telekom’s central research and innovation unit, joins the Hedera Hashgraph Governing Council. Hedera provides a new form of distributed consensus; a way for people who do not know or trust each other to securely collaborate and transact online without the need for a trusted intermediary. With the cooperation, T-Labs extends its network of partners and drives further its various blockchain research projects.

Hedera’s vision is to create a safer, fairer, more secure internet - one in which online communities can collectively create and evolve shared worlds in cyberspace, and on which developers can build trusted applications that enable people to play games and work together and buy and sell goods and services safely and securely, without entrusting a central organization with their data and privacy. To realize this vision, Hedera has focused on addressing four fundamental challenges to the adoption of public distributed ledger technology - technology, security, stability, and governance.

“Distributed ledger technology is fundamentally changing business models and will evolve all types of systems in our society,” said John Calian, Senior Vice President, Head of T-Labs & The Blockchain Group, Deutsche Telekom. “Hedera has uniquely thought through the security, governance and scalability concerns that have hampered early iterations of blockchain technology. We are thrilled to be an initial governing member of the Hedera Hashgraph Council, to help shepherd this important technology as it is adopted by the market.”

“A general-purpose public ledger should be governed by representatives from a broad range of market sectors and geographies, each with world-class expertise in their respective industries,” said Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera. “With this inaugural group, we are demonstrating the caliber of organizations it takes to deliver long-lasting, stable governance for the industry’s first enterprise-ready public ledger. The Hedera Council’s governing members will provide the technical expertise to manage the technical roadmap, business expertise to manage business operations, expertise in economics and currency markets to manage the cryptocurrency, and legal expertise to help navigate the evolving regulatory environment.”

T-Labs aspires to develop more Hedera-based projects that create customer value and business impact while also sharing their insights to promote co-innovation within the Hedera community.

About Hedera

The Hedera hashgraph platform will offer a distributed public ledger that enables anyone to easily develop globally decentralized applications. Developers can build secure, fair, blazing-fast decentralized applications on top of the Hedera hashgraph platform. For more information, visit https://hedera.com. The Hedera whitepaper can be found at https://hedera.com/whitepaper.