This episode of Dustin Plantholt’s “Life’s Tough, You Can Be Tougher” podcast features Leemon Baird, co-founder and chief scientist at distributed ledger company Hedera Hashgraph.

Hedera is a next-generation distributed ledger – going beyond blockchain. Hedera-based applications are used in a variety of data-driven industries. One of Hedera’s initial services is cryptocurrency, a virtual currency that uses encryption algorithms and other mechanisms to ensure security.

Hedera provides technology that advances the inherent advantages of cryptocurrency transactions – namely, that you can conduct micropayment transactions in secure, decentralized environments, using a protocol that provides the benefits of being fast, fair and low-cost.

Leemon is the inventor of the “hashgraph distributed consensus algorithm,” which enables transactions to take place in a trusted, fast, fair, and secure manner without the need for intermediaries.

In addition to his more than 20 years of experience with technology and start-up enterprises, Leemon was a professor of Computer Science at the Air Force Academy and has been the senior scientist at several labs. He has a doctorate in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Life’s tough – you can be tougher, like Leemon Baird, a true visionary who has carved out new pathways to ensure computer security, enhance machine-learning and take the study of mathematics into fields that never existed a short time ago.