In this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Leemon Baird, the inventor of Hashgraph, a new, distributed ledger technology poised to disrupt the entire ecosystem of blockchain-based applications and cryptocurrencies.

Leemon Baird is the Co-founder and CTO of Swirlds Inc. With over 20 years of technology and startup experience, he has held positions as a Professor of Computer Science at the Air Force Academy, Adjunct Professor at multiple other prestigious universities, and as a senior scientist in several labs. He has been the co-founder of several startups, including two identity-related starts-ups with successful exits. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University faster than any student in school history (2 years, 9 months), has multiple patents, and over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals on computer security, machine learning, and mathematics. He regularly keynotes on these topics at conferences.

In this nearly hour-long conversation, our audience will get a first-hand look at what may become the future of the Internet. Hashgraph is a revolutionary new distributed ledger technology like no other. It is able to scale faster, with greater safety, and more fairly than any of its blockchain competitors. This makes Hashgraph superior to existing blockchain databases in every way — i.e., unlike blockchain, it is fast/high throughput (100,000< transactions per second pre sharding), fair (mathematically proven fairness with consensus time stamping), and secure (asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant). These properties expand decentralized use cases to complex markets, auctions, crypto-currency micro payments, live games (even MMOs), and much more.

Swirlds has secured early funding from New Enterprise Associates and already has enterprise adoption. It has been adopted by credit unions, payment providers, and is currently in due diligence phases with large banks. Official footage was just released of decentralized applications built in 24 hours at the TechCrunch Disrupt 24hr Hackathon using the Hashgraph SDK i.e. a decentralized live game, a decentralized eBay / auction market, a decentralized Disaster Relief Platform , and more. These are examples of distributed applications which cannot be made using current blockchain technology.

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

Join the conversation at @hiddenforcespod

Leemon Baird is the inventor of the hashgraph distributed consensus algorithm, and is the Co-founder and CTO of Hedera Hashgraph and Swirlds Inc. With over 20 years of technology and startup experience, he has held positions as a Professor of Computer Science at the Air Force Academy and as a senior scientist in several labs. He has been the co-founder of several startups, including two identity-related starts-ups, which were acquired. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and has multiple patents and publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences in computer security, machine learning, and mathematics.

@LeemonBaird