The council was established to drive collaborative development of the Hedera Hashgraph patented technology platform, billed as being “faster, fairer and more secure than traditional blockchains”.
Zain is the first company from the Middle East to join the council and will sit alongside 39 other members from 11 industries. These include: Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, FIS (WorldPay), Google, IBM, LG Electronics, Magalu, Nomura, Swirlds, Swisscom Blockchain, Tata Communications, University College London, and Wipro.
Zain VC and group CEO, Bader Al Kharafi (pictured) said: “We feel a sense of purpose in joining the Hedera Governing Council, which has numerous blue chip, innovation-driven organisations all interested in driving the development of blockchains and the wider DLT space, which we have already noted has phenomenal potential. Council membership provides Zain first-hand exposure to cutting-edge and secure technologies that drive innovation, e-commerce and B2B across the region.”
As a member Zain will also receive early insights into the trends and applications in the DLT space and will be able to assess opportunities to develop services within its own field of operation.
Citing the “growing list of new services” offered by Zain – including the group API platform, mobile money and fintech, e-health, drones, IoT and 5G – Al Kharafi said can all be further enhanced through blockchain and other DLT solutions.
“Our participation in the council also speaks to another pillar of Zain's corporate strategy, which is to collaborate with leading industry players to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes and thereby improve the products and services we can deliver to our customers,” he added.
Hedera said it aims to “realise its vision to create a safer, fairer, more secure internet” through a focus on addressing four fundamental challenges to the adoption of public DLT: technology, security, stability, and governance.
It said that to deliver impactful results, “the network needs to be governed by representatives from a broad range of market sectors and geographies, each with world-class expertise in their respective industries”.
As such, council members are expected to contribute technical expertise to manage the technical roadmap; business expertise to advise on business operations; and legal expertise to help navigate the evolving regulatory environment.
Hedera CEO Mance Harmon said: “We are delighted to have Zain Group join the council, given the company's track record of innovation, and professionalism in the development and delivery of cutting-edge mobile services and applications.
“We believe the council will be enriched greatly by this first organisation to join us from the Middle East region, given Zain Group's eight country footprint. We hope Zain will take full advantage of the opportunity to immerse itself in hashgraph and distributed ledger technologies and gain first-hand knowledge of new technologies and use cases developed on the Hedera network.”
Zain provides mobile voice and data services to more than 49.5 million active customers and in 2019 recorded annual turnover circa US$5.5 billion.
