Hashgraph is an alternative distributed ledger technology (DLT) to the blockchain, which can be used for any decentralized application including cryptocurrency. It uses virtual voting to achieve true real-time consensus that is asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant (aBFT), which is steeped in academic literature and mathematical proofs, proving it to be the most robust form of voting consensus possible. The exact transaction order from multiple decentralized nodes can be reconstructed through a networked history known as the hashgraph. Transactions originating from nodes are propagated throughout the network in the fastest way possible using the gossip protocol. The gossip includes information about whom else each node gossipped to, dubbed 'gossip about gossip' which allows the consensus to be calculated with mathematical certainty. Each time consensus is achieved, each node can drop the previous history, removing the need for every node to maintain a full ledger history since the genesis (block). This gossipping allows throughput speed of hundreds of thousands of transactions per second per shard versus Bitcoin's 3-7 per second. All of this is achievable with virtually no fees and it scales up even further with sharding. The inventor Leemon Baird PhD is commercializing the technology through a company called Swirlds and now is delivering permissioned private hashgraph networks to clients that include a consortium of thousands of credit unions (CULedger). The sheer speed and mathematically guaranteed consensus aspects of hashgraph make it lightyears ahead of any blockchain technology, which can only achieve probabilistic consensus much slower with higher fees. Supposedly, the company is working on a public ledger cryptocurrency built on top of hashgraph, that is currently in stealth mode. I thought it might be useful for the STEEM community to be aware of this emerging technology before it is available to the public.

https://hashgraph.com/

http://www.swirlds.com/