Yes. Although the parties originally entered a non-exclusive license, the parties have recently reached an agreement on such terms. Accordingly, Hedera and Swirlds have entered into an Amended and Restated Master License Agreement (“MLA”), by which Swirlds has granted to Hedera an exclusive (even as to Swirlds) non-transferable, perpetual right and license in and to the hashgraph technology for the limited and sole purpose of making the Hedera network a general-purpose public ledger available to entities or individuals to use as developers, users, testers and node operators.[1] The MLA does not preclude Swirlds from licensing its technology or providing services using the hashgraph technology platform other than for a general-purpose public ledger, and specifically does not preclude Swirlds from licensing its technology or providing services directly to governments or central banks for the purpose of a central bank digital currency.
[1] The MLA defines “General-Purpose Public Ledger” or “Public Ledger” to mean “a set of more than ten (10) computers controlled by at least ten (10) un-Affiliated Persons, operating as a unified system to provide a distributed ledger by cooperating to reach consensus on transaction order and to store the resulting state, the state including evolving cryptocurrency account balances, the cryptocurrency account balances kept more than a month, the cryptocurrency account balances being required to perform transactions on the ledger, wherein the cryptocurrency accounts can be created by anonymous people, who can transfer cryptocurrency between cryptocurrency accounts.”