UK Investment Firm Abrdn Continues Crypto Push With Hedera (HBAR)

U.K. investment company Abrdn has joined the Hedera Governing Council to improve fund management using Hedera Hashgraph’s technology.

Initially, Abrdn wants to list tokenized investment funds on a digital exchange through Hedera Hasgraph’s robust governance model, innovative technology, and environmentally-friendly operations, according to a Hedera blog post. 

Why Abrdn chose Hedera

Abrdn, with over $570 million in assets under management, also sees an opportunity to use Hedera’s technology for other distributed ledger-based services in collaboration with third-party Council members. 

“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 rapid speed and asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (ABFT) security, Hedera offers a highly promising DLT solution for the fund management industry, and we look forward to joining them on their journey,” said Duncan Moir, an Abrdn investment manager.

Abrdn joins the likes of aircraft manufacturer Boeing, gaming company Ubisoft, Google, and South Africa’s Standard Bank on the Council that governs the operation of the Hedera ecosystem.

By joining the Hedera council, Abrdn makes its second foray into the crypto business after becoming a major shareholder at Archax, a U.K.-based digital securities exchange. Archax makes digital assets available to institutional investors. 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 holds crypto in cold storage for institutional investors.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, also opened its doors to institutional investors interested in crypto by launching a Bitcoin private trust where investors can purchase shares to get access to Bitcoin. It also recently struck a deal with crypto 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. The speed of validating transactions increases the more transactions are added to the network. Consensus is reached via a so-called gossip protocol.

Hedera’s governance by 19 significant corporations has raised questions regarding its decentralization merits. Also, unlike Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, the Hedera network is proprietary rather than open-source.

Hedera supports smart contracts written in Solidity, which opens up the network to diverse applications in GameFi and DeFi. Its native cryptocurrency is HBAR. At press time, HBAR is up 2.6% compared to 24 hours earlier, trading at approximately $0.06.

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