Hedera Hashgraph opens up mainnet testing to developers

Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed ledger platform, announced the launch of its community testing program. The program allows developers and members of the community to test Hedera's mainnet and testnet. For testing its network and dApps, Hedera will reward testers up to 1,000 hbars, Hedera's native cryptocurrency. Current applications available for testing include a content site, a daily timestamp, and a micropayment Chrome extension.

To date, Hedera Hashgraph has raised $118M from investors including Digital Currency Group and BlockTower Capital. Hedera's goal for its platform is to enable developers to build "blazing-fast decentralized applications." According to its whitepaper, Hedera's platform can offer "throughput up to almost 500,000 transactions per second." However, there are concerns about the accuracy of this speed estimate. According to a report by Diar, Hedera's transaction speed estimates "do not include time to process transactions." Mance Harmon, CEO and Co-founder of Hedera Hashgraph told Diar that “Hashgraph as an algorithm has fantastic performance in posting transactions in order but the bottleneck comes in with the signature verification.”