What is Hedera?
Hedera is a public distributed ledger governed by the Hedera Governing Council – a body of up to 39 global enterprise organisations, each serving a term-limited seat with equal voting rights. The Council controls decisions about the Hedera network's software, economics, and policy. No single organisation controls Hedera, and no organisation can unilaterally change its behaviour.
This matters for Audrie because the authenticity of a file authenticated in 2025 may need to be verified in 2035 or 2045. The institution anchoring that record must have the structural permanence and credibility to still be operating, and to still be trusted, decades from now.
Governing Council – selected members
Google · IBM · Boeing · Deutsche Telekom · Nomura · Shinhan Bank · Standard Bank · ServiceNow · Dell · Avery Dennison · Chainlink Labs · Dentons · eftpos (Australian Payments Plus) · EDF · FIS · Georgetown University · Magalu · Mondelez · Tata Communications · University College London · Wipro · Zain Group
The full council roster is published and updated at hedera.com/council. Council membership rotates, preventing entrenchment.
What the Hedera Consensus Service is designed for
Audrie uses the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) – a service built specifically for one purpose: creating an immutable, ordered, publicly verifiable log of messages. HCS is not a smart contract platform. It is a purpose-built timestamping and ordering service where any message submitted to a topic is permanently recorded, given a globally ordered sequence number, and assigned a consensus timestamp.
Finality in 3 to 5 seconds.
Once a message is accepted by Hedera, it is final. There is no probabilistic confirmation, no waiting for additional blocks, and no possibility of a transaction being reorganised out of the ledger. For a file authentication record, this means the moment the record is written, it is permanent.
No smart contracts required.
The record is written directly to a public topic as structured data. No executable code is involved, which eliminates an entire class of technical risk and complexity.
Public read access at no cost.
Anyone – any person, any system, any regulator, any court – can read the full history of Audrie's public HCS topic at any time, without authentication, without API keys, and without cost. Hedera mirror nodes provide this access globally.
Institutional credibility.
Compromising the integrity of HCS would require collusion of more than two-thirds of 39 council members – organisations including Google, IBM, and Boeing – simultaneously. This is not a realistic attack vector.
No file content is ever stored on Hedera.
Audrie publishes only a cryptographic record of a file's existence and authenticity – never the file itself. What is anchored to Hedera is a hash, a signature, and identity metadata. The underlying file remains entirely under the control of the authenticating party.
Why Audrie chose Hedera over alternatives
Audrie evaluated multiple anchoring options before selecting Hedera HCS. Hedera was selected because it is purpose-built for immutable logging, has finality measured in seconds rather than minutes or days, is governed by organisations that will demonstrably still exist in twenty years, and provides free public read access without requiring any integration with Audrie.
Alternative considered
Ethereum L1
Strong ecosystem credibility, but confirmation times measured in minutes rather than seconds – an unacceptable delay for a platform where authentication records must be final and usable immediately. Ethereum L1 anchoring remains on Audrie's roadmap as a premium dual-ledger option for customers requiring the maximum trust guarantee.
Alternative considered
Ethereum L2 networks
Networks such as Arbitrum or Base offer faster confirmations than L1, but introduce a challenge period of up to seven days before finality relative to the L1. They also depend on newer ecosystem maturity with less established institutional credibility.
Alternative considered
Permissionless public blockchains
Create governance risk: their behaviour is subject to community decisions that no enterprise organisation controls. The Hedera council model provides a different guarantee – known, named, accountable institutions governing the network according to published rules.
What this means for records that outlive Audrie
This is the most consequential property of Audrie's architecture for the organisations that use it.
Every file authenticated through Audrie produces a record that is published to Audrie's public HCS topic. That record is self-contained. It includes the cryptographic hash of the file, the digital signature of the authenticator, the authenticator's public key fingerprint, their identity tier, and a timestamp. It contains no file content whatsoever – only the cryptographic proof that a specific file existed, was unaltered, and was attested to by a verified identity at a specific moment in time.
This record is sufficient, on its own, to verify the authenticity of a file – without Audrie's API, without Audrie's database, and without Audrie's continued existence. Independent developers could build Audrie-compatible verification tools using only public Hedera data. Courts, regulators, and counterparties could independently verify records using freely available Hedera infrastructure.
The no-regrets guarantee
If Audrie were to cease operations tomorrow, every file authenticated through the platform would remain permanently verifiable. The record is not held by Audrie. It is held by Hedera – governed by Google, IBM, Boeing, and their council peers – and is publicly accessible to anyone who wants it.
Vendor dependency is the legitimate concern of any procurement decision. Audrie addresses it architecturally: the authentication record does not depend on Audrie's continued operation, because it was never stored only by Audrie.
What this means for you
For Directors and Company Secretaries
When your board authorises Audrie for file authentication, the records of those authentications are not held solely by a vendor. They are permanently anchored to a public ledger governed by some of the largest enterprises in the world. No file content is exposed – only the cryptographic proof of authenticity. If Audrie is unavailable – for any reason, at any point in the future – your authenticated files remain verifiable. That is the correct architecture for records that may need to demonstrate their authenticity in regulatory proceedings, litigation, or due diligence contexts years from now.
For Banks, AML/CTF Reporting Entities, and Regulated Counterparties
The organisations on Hedera's Governing Council include global banks, telecommunications companies, and financial services firms. The network Audrie anchors to is not a speculative technology project. It is enterprise infrastructure with known governance, auditable records, and institutional backing. When you accept an Audrie-authenticated file for compliance purposes, the underlying record is accessible independently through Hedera's public mirror nodes – providing an auditable chain of evidence that does not rely on any single vendor's continued availability. Critically, the ledger contains only the authentication record, not the file itself, meaning confidential counterparty files are never exposed.
For Lawyers and Accountants
The records you create when you authenticate files through Audrie persist permanently on the Hedera ledger. They cannot be deleted, altered, or suppressed. The authentication record is a durable, publicly verifiable statement of your professional attestation. This permanence is the basis of the non-repudiation that makes Audrie authentication meaningful – and it is guaranteed by Hedera's architecture, not by Audrie's promises. Your clients' file contents are never part of what is anchored; only the proof of your attestation is.
Technical Reference
Hedera network
hedera.com
Governing Council
hedera.com/council
Mirror node access (free, public)
mainnet.mirrornode.hedera.com
Finality
3–5 seconds
Audrie topic
Published openly at audrie.io and in the Audrie open protocol documentation
Direct record retrieval
See the Audrie protocol documentation for instructions on retrieving and verifying records directly from the Hedera ledger without Audrie
What is stored on Hedera
Cryptographic hash, authenticator signature, public key fingerprint, identity tier, and timestamp only – never file content