AR Rahman To Drop NFTs On Hedera Hashgraph Consensus Network

AR Rahman will be dropping his own NFTs on the Hedera Network in partnership with the HBAR foundation, which is creating a new NFT music platform targeted at India’s independent music community. The Oscar-winning music composer and singer’s NFTs will be dropping along with the launch of this new platform. 

“We’re excited to partner with HBAR Foundation to create content, as well as support and mentor the new NFT platform, which in turn will bring more opportunities to the Indian music community,” said Rahman. 

“The new platform will enable independent musical artists to release content as NFTs, interact with fans, engage with their communities and help monetise their creations,” added AR Rahman

Hedera is a public distributed ledger that uses a hashgraph consensus mechanism as opposed to the proof-of-work mechanism used by blockchain ledgers like bitcoin and ethereum. The network claims much higher transaction speeds and lower transaction fees while offering the same trustless security as other networks. 

“Hedera’s governance is fully decentralised, consisting of up to 39 term-limited and highly diversified leading organisations and enterprises,” claimed the network’s website. But the word ‘decentralised’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. 

What it means is that the governance is centralised among 39 different organisations. These 39 organisations include Google, Boeing, IBM, the London School of Economics and Political Science, Tata Communications and others. 

“The HBAR Foundation is proud to support innovative projects across the globe, and our strategic partnership with AR Rahman provides tremendous value to the HBAR ecosystem with its focus on the large and vibrant music community in India,” said Shayne Higdon, executive director and CEO of the HBAR Foundation. 

The Hedera Consensus Network also claims to use a variety of tools including verifiable timestamps, tamper-proof logs, and real-time analysis to combat digital fraud. 

Hedera Hashgraph Consensus Network: How does it work? 

Unlike proof-of-work blockchains which select a single miner to choose the next block, the community of nodes on the hashgraph network use ‘gossip-about-gossip’ and virtual voting to come to a consensus about the validity and timestamp of every transaction. Let us illustrate: 

Blockchain consensus rules require that the blocks eventually settle into a single, long chain agreed upon by the community. If two blocks are created at the same time, the network will agree upon one and discard the other to ensure that a particular blockchain doesn’t ‘fork’ into two different chains.

Think of it like growing a tree that constantly has all but one of the branches chopped off. In hashgraph consensus, on the other hand, every container of transaction is incorporated into the ledger and none are discarded. All the ‘branches’ continue to exist and are woven into a single whole.

Blockchains need a proof-of-work mechanism or other methods to slow down the growth of the blockchain so that containers don’t arrive too quickly: which will lead to information loss. This is where the hashgraph consensus system takes the advantage to become faster, more energy-efficient and cheaper. 

The Hedera Network claims that its consensus algorithm has been validated as an Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (ABFT) network. If that is true, it would mean that the network works by taking into account the possibility of some nodes being malicious or incorrect.