Abrdn continues crypto push with Hedera partnership
UK investment firm 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 in the Hedera Governing Council because Hedera’s emphasis on strong governance, innovation and sustainability is closely aligned 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,” said Duncan Moir, an Abrdn Investment Manager.
Abrdn joins the likes of aircraft manufacturer Boeing, games company Ubisoft, Google and South Africa’s Standard Bank on the council that governs the operation of the Hedera ecosystem.
By joining the Hedera board, Abrdn makes its second foray into the crypto business after becoming a major shareholder in Archax, a UK-based digital securities exchange. Archax makes digital assets available to institutional investors. It was the first institution to offer clients tokenized versions of physical assets.
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 hoarding. NYDIG keeps 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 buy shares to gain 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 companies. Hedera can process 10,000 transactions per second, each taking three to five seconds to settle. The speed of validation of transactions increases the more transactions are added to the network. Consensus is achieved via a so-called gossip protocol.
Hedera’s management of 19 significant companies has raised questions regarding the benefits of decentralization. Unlike Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, the Hedera network is proprietary rather than open source.
Hedera supports smart contracts written in Solidity, which open up the network for 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 approximately $0.06.
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