A new distributed consensus model, Hashgraph — built-in consensus, no voting required

Ping Identity and stealth startup Swirlds on Monday unveiled a breakthrough identity management app and a unique distributed consensus platform designed to cure blockchain’s ills.

This Monday, at the opening keynote of this year's Cloud Identity Summit (CIS) in New Orleans, Swirlds (a shared world mashup site) publicly introduced itself for the first time and demonstrated their Hashgraph distributed consensus platform. The Swirlds platform brings three unique capabilities to the distributed consensus model - high throughput, fairness, and community consensus. This consensus is guaranteed, rather than accidental mutation or probabilistic like blockchain.

Consensus basically means that different people reach an agreement on whether a certain thing or issue is correct or not. Currently, the most popular consensus model is blockchain.

Leemon Baird, the creator of Hashgraph and CEO of Swirlds, said the platform supports a variety of applications, such as trade markets, banking, identity applications, etc. Baird will demonstrate the platform's application in the stock market at CIS on Tuesday.

On top of this platform, Ping Identity has created a distributed session management application that for the first time provides system administrators with a "kill switch" to shut down all activities and applications that users log in. Ping Identity led the seed round of funding for Swirlds. Current identity protocols such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), OAuth, and OpenID Connect (OIDC) do not support distributed session logout, providing security and management control permissions on all devices, which may support the theory of continuous authentication.

Mance Harmon, senior director of architecture and labs at Ping Identity, said:

“Hashgraph is a new technology that explores the identity problem and solves it in a fundamentally different way.”

Hashgraph is a platform that can run on a laptop or desktop, and there are many apps that can run on the platform. According to Baird, Hashgraph provides the ability to not only prove that something happened, but also to timestamp when it happened, which blockchain cannot. The formation of consensus is not determined by voting, but is inherent in the system. Hashgraph provides an encrypted receipt that can listen to and record the opinions of community participants.

In order to solve the mathematical equations used to generate blocks, the blockchain must slow down, a process that takes an average of 10 minutes, but Hashgraph does not rely on equations or miners to solve. Hashgraph never discards any information, nor ignores certain information, which helps fairness, while the entire community decides what to prioritize.

Baird holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States and has conducted research in many areas, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, encryption, security, computer science theory, and programming languages. He said:

“No one is talking about building a stock market on the Bitcoin blockchain, but you can do it with Swirlds. No one is looking to do matching (like in a stock market) on a blockchain because to do that you need high throughput and fairness.”

Swirlds allows unlimited creation of apps and each app can create any number of shared worlds, just like Microsoft Word can be used to create many Word docs.

Baird said he could imagine a future where a driver's license would no longer be a physical piece of plastic but a symbol stored in a ledger. The DMV would be able to update the license, and you would control who could see it. This use case would create privacy by allowing people to control how their information is shared.

Baird also said that Swirlds is about trust. It will become a trust layer for the Internet. And this trust layer did not exist before the Internet. We are generating trust.

This concept maps onto identity, an area where trust and its derivatives are king.

Ping Identity has adopted Hashgraph and built a proof-of-concept distributed session management application that may well allow the identity industry to overcome some major hurdles. At the simplest level, this application uses Hashgraph to synchronize the identity session database, can log out globally, and is based on Swirlds as the underlying platform. Other applications can also be built, including continuous authentication.

Ping Identity is working with the OpenID Foundation to explore the concept of distributed session management into a building block that can serve as a basis for other identity applications.

"With distributed sessions, you have a verifiable and shared state in a database. So the identity provider can determine when the app receives the instruction to close the session."

Harmon said that Hashgraph-powered apps can handle thousands of transactions per second, compared to the three to seven transactions per second on the Bitcoin blockchain.

One of the goals of Swirlds is to explore continuous authentication, where the user's identity stays with their session and application. The ultimate goal is to eliminate the concept of session, that is, the user logs directly into the application or activity.

Harmon said:

"The reason we're using sessions is that we don't have continuous authentication right now, and if the identity in the session disappears, you need a kill switch that works for all client types."