I just came across something called hashgraph that seems to be able to replace blockchains as the basis of distributed ledgers.

The hashgraph is wrtten up by Dr Leemon Baird in this paper: http://leemon.com/papers/2016b.pdf is by the main author Leemon Baird.

He is the founder of a company called Swirlds (www.swirlds.com). Swirlds has implemented the hashgraph algorithm and provides a development environment for people to write applications on top of. It seems that Swirlds has been in stealth mode for the last 5 years or so.

The swirlds technology is, unfortunately, closed source and their demo platform is at:

http://www.swirlds.com/download/

with demo apps (these demo apps are also in the download above):

https://github.com/lbaird/swirlds-demos

Both the SDK and demo codes are jar files. The source code of the demo is in public domain.

One of the key advantages of hashgraph is the number of transactions per seconds that goes into the tens of thousands while being able to maintain consensus with a certainty of 1 and also to be fair.

Hashgraph does not suffer wasteful computational cycles of blocks to arrive at consensus (and hence the power savings).

They don’t have a public block yet (they have a demo of it).

Swirlds has 3 patents (http://www.swirlds.com/ip/).

From their website, their business model is to license their base environment for production.

I feel they are on to something.

More backgroud:
a) https://squawker.org/technology/blockchain-just-became-obsolete-the-future-is-hashgraph/
b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg-0Dgxc0io (The Future is Not Blockchain, it’s hashgraph)
c) https://youtu.be/ole2WuwNLL4 (The Future Of Consensus | A Panel Discussion With The Hashgraph Team At The Assemblage NYC

You can follow hashgraph on telegram https://t.me/hashgraph