Just like that, the first month of 2019 is behind us. We had a fast and furious start to the year at Hedera, with the continuation of our community testing program, which enabled users to test the network and earn hbars for the first time, and our continued march to our open access of the Hedera mainnet beta.
Check out some of the key updates below to see what we've been up to!
Improving SDKs We've continued to make progress on our Java, Rust, C, Go, and Python SDKs, since having developers get hands-on with them for the first time a few months ago and participating in a few recent hackathons. A bonus was how much fun we had at the hackathons at the University of Arizona and UC Santa Cruz - congrats to the winning teams: Hashtap, Phil, and Premiumify.
In February, we’ll continue to add SDK support for the Hedera platform in its entirety, improve performance, and build detailed documentation that will help you start building quickly.
We always want more involvement from people in the community like you, be it raising issues, contributing directly, or building SDKs of your own. If that’s of interest and you want some guidance to get started, then be sure to join us in Discord.
Looking to scale Thanks to the now concluded first phase of the community testing program, we’ve had the chance to test our network in a meaningful way. We cleared 5,000 accounts on the Hedera mainnet and 3,000 downloads of our micropayments demo app, the Hedera Browser Extension, and had hundreds of developers access our testnets to start building their own apps – thanks to those that participated.
This testing has proved invaluable, showing us how Hedera is being used and what we can do to make it even better. Specifically, we've taken steps to improve the user experience of consuming digital media with micropayments, as well as monitored performance of the network.
This is exciting as we move towards open access of our mainnet beta and the ability for anyone to create new accounts. We can’t wait to see the first set of applications, like Hash-hash, that become available.
Forming a diversified governing council For enterprise and startups alike, we continue to hear interest in the stability and activity driven by our unique governance model. We have continued to sign up the initial members of the Hedera Governing Council, with diverse representation already coming from multiple geographies and industries. Many of these members excitingly have their initial applications scoped and are even beginning development. We’re eager to share more details with you soon.
We’ve also used this opportunity to determine how to better support enterprise distributed ledger adoption. We travelled on site to conduct workshops ideating on potential proof of concepts, as well as leveraged our diverse and growing ecosystem of partners to show what's possible on Hedera.
Not only are we growing the Hedera Governing Council, but we're expanding our team as well. We’ve primarily focused on adding new people in engineering and product, as well as recruiting key talent to support the council.
Lionel Chocron, a former executive from Oracle, recently joined as Chief Product Officer. Lionel brings years of experience in launching and scaling technology products for enterprise use. Along with Lionel, Atul Mahamuni has joined as Senior Vice President of Products and Nigel Clark as Senior Vice President of Partners and Industries - welcome to the team, Lionel, Atul, and Nigel!
And we’re not done yet! Check out our careers page to see the exciting opportunities to join us in our mission to create a more secure digital future.