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# System prepended metadata

title: What is Hedera?

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# What is Hedera?
Hedera isn’t a blockchain in the traditional sense, it is a Hashgraph. A hashgraph is a distributed consensus algorithm invented by Dr. Leemon Baird (who also Co-Founded Hedera and is the Chief Scientist) and this feature is primarily why Hedera is about to take the smart contract industry by storm. The Hashgraph algorithm provides near-perfect efficiency in bandwidth (data upload/download) usage and is thus able to support and process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second in a single shard (A shard being a fully connected peer2peer mesh of decentralized nodes in the network.) A further illustration of this Hashgraph Distributed. Consensus Algorithm is depicted below:

![](https://i.imgur.com/LvzfhQ8.png)

Typical blockchain ordering vs. the hashgraph ordering. The network is actively being researched, and utilized by industry leaders in enterprise settings. Titans of industry by the likes of Google, IBM, LG, Boeing and now Ubisoft comprise a group of twenty-seven industry leaders which make up the Hedera Governance Council (which will eventually expand to thirty-nine members).


