Abrn joins companies such as aircraft manufacturer Boeing, gaming company Ubisoft, Google, and Standard Bank of South Africa on the Council that governs the operation of the Hedera ecosystem.
UK investment firm Abrdn has joined the Hedera Governing Council to improve fund management using Hedera Hashgraph technology.
On Twitter, Hedera posted that, “We are excited to announce that @abrdn_plc – the UK-based asset manager currently holding £508bn AUM – has joined the @Hedera Governing Council in a move to transform existing structural inefficiencies in the fund management industry using #DLT.”
Another tweet by Hedera expressed that, “We look forward to the new insights abrdn will bring to the Council, as well as the exploration of collaborative opportunities with existing Council Members that provide services for the fund management industry including banks, law firms, and tech companies.”
Initially, Abrdn aims to list tokenized investment funds on an exchange through Hedera Hasgraph’s strong governance model, innovative technology, and environmentally friendly operations, according to a Hedera blog post.
Why Abrdn Chose Hedera
Abrdn, with more than $570 million in assets under management, is also seizing an opportunity to use Hedera’s technology for other distributed ledger-based services, in collaboration with third-party Council members.
Duncan Moir, investment manager at Abrdn, explained:
“We chose to join a number of leading global organizations on the Hedera Governing Council because Hedera’s emphasis on strong governance, innovation, and sustainability aligns closely with our values. With fast speed and asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (ABFT) security, Hedera offers a very promising DLT solution for the fund management industry, and we look forward to joining them on their journey.”
By joining Hedera’s board, Abrdn makes his second foray into the cryptocurrency business after becoming a major shareholder in Archax, a UK-based digital stock exchange. Archax makes digital assets available to institutional investors. Thus, it was the first institution to offer clients tokenized versions of tangible assets.
The New York Digital Currency Group recently raised $720 million from 59 investors for an institutional Bitcoin fund, which could point to future Bitcoin purchases given the company’s history of hodling.
NYDIG keeps crypto in cold storage for institutional investors. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has also opened its doors to institutional investors interested in cryptocurrencies by launching a private Bitcoin trust where investors can buy shares to gain access to Bitcoin.
It also recently struck a deal with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to offer institutional investors access to crypto through Coinbase’s Prime product and BlackRock’s investment management software Aladdin.
What is the Hedera Network?
Hedera Hashraph is an enterprise-grade network that champions fairness, scalability, and speed and has been used in IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric, a type of distributed ledger. It uses a Proof-Of-Stake consensus mechanism and is secured by institutional validators from 19 major corporations.
Hedera can process 10,000 transactions per second, each taking three to five seconds to settle. Transaction validation speed increases as more transactions are added to the network. Consensus is reached through the so-called gossip protocol.
Hedera’s rule by 19 major corporations has raised questions about its decentralization merits. Also, unlike Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, the Hedera network is proprietary and not open source.
Hedera supports smart contracts written in Solidity, opening the network to various applications in GameFi and DeFi. Its native cryptocurrency is HBAR. At press time, HBAR is up 2.6% compared to the previous 24 hours, trading at roughly $0.06.
By Audy Castaneda
