Hello Future. Today, we take an exciting step in the further decentralization and growth of the Hedera network.

As part of the Hedera Governing Council’s decisions to enable broader market participation on the Hedera network, we, along with the majority of the Hedera Hashgraph team, have now formally launched Swirlds Labs. For those who haven’t followed the journey, a more detailed explanation of the reasons for this move can be found in Hedera’s January announcement here: 

 https://hedera.com/blog/hedera-governing-council-votes-to-purchase-hashgraph-ip-commits-to-open-source-worlds-most-advanced-distributed-ledger-technology 

Now that we’re at Swirlds Labs, what will we build? You can think of development at Swirlds Labs as falling into four categories:

  1. Ongoing development of the Hedera network. We will continue to provide ongoing development for the Hedera network and core services, doing everything from providing suggestions to Hedera’s Technical and Product Steering Committee on the overarching direction of the network to working with the community to implement HIPs. Swirlds Labs’ developer advocates will continue to support and engage with developers to make sure they have the tools and resources they need to build massively scalable applications on the Hedera platform. And the Swirlds Labs marketing team will continue to tell the stories of those dapps and others using the Hedera network. 
  2. Community tooling. In addition, we’ll have an emphasis on developing community tools, for the benefit of all users of the Hedera network. For example, check out HashScan (hashscan.io), an open-source ledger explorer and analytics platform for the Hedera network, which we have launched in conjunction with our move. We’ve heard from the community that these pieces of tooling are critical for a smoothly running ecosystem, so we at Swirlds Labs will keep building them. 
  3. Open Source Enterprise Components. The world’s largest enterprises have told us they need someone to build a set of products that make it super easy for enterprises to hook into and use the Hedera network. Just as AWS initially only provided infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and quickly realized that customers needed platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities to truly utilize the platform at scale, Swirlds Labs may develop APIs and open source components for services that enterprises and others want to offer, such as loyalty token management, bond issuance, NFT marketplaces, peer-to-peer payments, and more.  
  4. Leemon’s Lab Projects: We are firm believers that great ideas come when you give people time to step back and ask “what’s really missing here.” These out-of-the-box ideas, like Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) – which would enable you to sleep well at night knowing you can always recover your account securely, regardless of where you’ve stored your hbars, even if you misplace your private keys – will now be ones that we can explore and invest in at Swirlds Labs, for the benefit of the entire ecosystem. 

Looking back, it was almost a decade ago that Leemon started socializing the idea of Shared Worlds – places where anyone could live and safely carve out their own piece of cyberspace to collaborate, play games, conduct commerce, and control their own online footprint. We have spent the last half a decade laying the foundation for this world (new worlds take a long time to build, if they’re being built right!). We’re so excited to now take the next steps in realizing this future. 

Leemon & Mance