> Consensus nodes receive transactions, work together to determine consensus using hashgraph, and store the public ledger's latest state. The Hedera Governing Council currently runs all mainnet consensus nodes. As Hedera advances on its path to decentralization, anyone will be able run a consensus node.
https://hedera.com/hh-decentralization-of-consensus.pdf
> Hedera Hashgraph is a proof-of-stake network that aims to use permissionless nodes and a widespread coin distribution to ensure the network’s security while working to achieve complete decentralization.
> Hbar cryptocurrency represents the “stake” of voting power in Hedera’s proof-of-stake consensus model – more coins equal more voting power over consensus. Thus, to ensure the network’s security, hbars need to be widely distributed so no attacker or group of attackers can amass control over one-third of the coins.
> Until hbars are sufficiently distributed, Hedera will remain a permissioned network. To maintain the security of the network, the network will remain permissioned until the total value of all the circulating coins is high enough to be too expensive for a malicious user (or group of users) to buy one-third of the total supply to conduct an attack.
Whatever other good points their technology has on its efficiency and not using proof-of-work, their web site shows that (1) right now the network is centralized and consensus is operated by the original developers and people they've personally approved, (2) their path to eventual decentralization is reliant on their own judgments about the size and value of the network. The consensus part doesn't reflect an improvement on the status quo from the point of view of decentralization, in that all they've claimed is that, some day, when their network is big and valuable enough, they can allow it to decentralize because attacks will then become unreasonably expensive.
We might all be better off if a mechanism like this had already caught on to a huge extent instead of Bitcoin. But I don't see a particular innovation here for securing decentralized consensus relative to other proof-of-stake systems.