Hedera has removed community runnable nodes from their road map, giving up on their commitment to decentralization. The network is run by 31 multinational corporations that are hand selected by the Hedera Foundation.

I want to preface by saying I think Hedera is interesting technology and that there are some use cases for it. It isn’t a blockchain, it is a DAG which comes with it’s own trade offs (decentralization).

The thread where Hedera acknowledges removal of community nodes from their road map can be found here:

https://x.com/hedera/status/1801708707165725009

They claim that they’re taking community nodes off of their “short-term road map” which they consider the next 3-9 months.

Community run nodes have been on the road map for years so I would take this claim with a pinch of salt.

Here is a list of the 31 nodes run by huge corporations:

https://status.hedera.com/

You essentially need a supercomputer in a data center to run a node on Hedera.

Specs needed for nodes:

CPU: Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC); 24 cores/48 threads Network Connectivity: Sustained 1Gb/s internet bandwidth via a single 1-Gigabit / 10-Gigabit Ethernet interface RAM: 256 GB PC4-21300 2666MHz DDR4 ECC Registered DIMM or faster (minimum), 320GB or higher PC4-25600 3200MHz (recommended) Memory: Minimum: 5TB of SSD NVMe usable storage Recommended: 2 x 240GB SSD with RAID 1 for OS Storage 2 x NVMe devices as a 7.5TB RAID 0 (or 4x as RAID 10 array)

At a certain point I wonder what is the point of all of this if we’re just going to rely and trust huge corporations.

I’m disappointed in Hedera for giving up on decentralization. But anyone that has been paying attention has always known Hedera is made for huge corporations, not us.