Other blockchain platforms – Hashgraph, Corda, and IOTA

Hashgraph is a DLT with a superior consensus mechanism leveraging Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). Notably, the implementation of this project is not fully open source. The algorithm was designed and published by Leemon Baird and was initially released in 2017.

Corda is an open source DLT maintained by the financial services consortium R3. Corda offers a smart contracts platform to allow businesses to execute complex agreements, associating multiple variants of asset classes across various business domains, including supply chain, healthcare, and finance.

IOTA is an open source DLT that offers payment automation and secure communication between IoT devices. This project is maintained by the non-profit IOTA Foundation. Quoted as one of the promising ICOs, the project has delivered impressive wallets, a data marketplace for sensor data, and payment channels for quicker transaction settlements using a new special data structure called Tangle, eliminating the need for miners and traditional canonical representations of transactional data in blocks.

With this basic knowledge of blockchain platforms, let's now move on to look at the internal components of a typical blockchain network.