Zain Group, a leading telecoms provider in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has joined the governing council for enterprise-grade distributed ledger platform Hedera Hashgraph.
Zain provides mobile voice and data services in over 49.5 million active customers and has a commercial presence in eight countries in the MENA region including:
- Kuwait
- Bahrain
- Iraq
- Jordan
- Saudi Arabia
On June 15, Hedera’s announcement stated that Zain’s joining of the council represents a regional first.
Existing members include Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, Google, IBM and Swisscom Blockchain and University College London, among others.
Each member of the council runs a node on the Hedera Hashgraph public network and is responsible for approving updates to the Hedera platform codebase.
The platform keeps its source code open for review.
Moreover, it uses a hashgraph-based consensus algorithm to allow for multiple branches of blocks, as opposed to a single chain.
By joining Hedera, Zain Group hopes to gain insights and exposure into trends and developments in the blockchain space, placing it in a better position to assess how to develop applications using the technology in its own field of operation.
Zain CEO and vice-chairman Badar Al Kharafi said that the Group sees its evolving services and applications including mobile money and fintech, e-health, drones, Internet of Things and 5G.
It all lends themselves to being further improved through the use of blockchain.
Source: Cointelegraph | Image: Unsplash
