The Block: Google joins Hedera Hashgraph's Governing Council; Token price jumps

Google has become a member of the governing body for distributed ledger startup Hedera Hashgraph, according to a Tuesday announcement.

The cloud-focused business unit said in a blog post that "as part of our council membership, Google Cloud will operate a Hedera network node, and make the ledger data available for analytics alongside GCP's other public DLT datasets, bolstering GCP's position as the cloud provider of choice for DLT networks and decentralized applications."

"We’re inspired by what Hedera has accomplished to date, and look forward to providing the infrastructure and technologies to support what’s possible with distributed ledger technology," Allen Day, developer advocate for Google Cloud, wrote in the post.

The move represents the deepening of an existing relationship, according to Hedera.

“We initially turned to Google Cloud for its ease of use, networking advantages and overall platform performance,” Atul Mahamuni, Hedera's SVP of products, said in a statement. “The Google Cloud Platform was the perfect foundation to help us achieve our goals to bring enterprise-ready DLT adoption at scale.”

Other members of the Governing Council include IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Boeing, Nomura and Tata Communications, among others.

The price of the networks' token, HBAR, popped on the news, spiking more than 60% on the day according to CoinMarketCap .

As The Block reported in December, the firm saw the price of its token fall precipitously since trading launched last September, prompting efforts to address the tumbling value. At the time, the firm asked existing SAFT (simple agreement for future tokens) holders to wait for their tokens to get unlocked in exchange for additional tokens.

Hedera raised $124 million across three different token sales, as previously reported.

Correction: This report and its headline have been updated to reflect that Google, not Google cloud, is becoming a governing council member.