Hedera(HBAR)

Hedera's mainnet went live in early-access form on August 24, 2018 and opened to the public on September 16, 2019. It was co-founded by Dr. Leemon Baird, who invented the hashgraph algorithm, and Mance Harmon. The network is governed by the Hedera Council, a body of up to 39 organizations that serve rotating, term-limited seats (up to two consecutive three-year terms) with equal voting power. Members include Google, IBM, Dell, LG Electronics, and Tata Communications; Mondelez International joined in February 2024 and the energy company Repsol joined in December 2025. The Council's own site describes 33 member organizations across 13 industries. This corporate governance model is intentional: Hedera is betting that enterprises trust a network overseen by recognizable names.

Hedera does not use a blockchain. It runs on hashgraph, a DAG-based consensus algorithm that combines "gossip about gossip" with virtual voting: nodes spread transaction information to random peers, and each node calculates how the others would vote from the shared event graph rather than exchanging vote messages. Hedera describes this as asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT), secure as long as fewer than one third of nodes are malicious. Hedera's documentation cites throughput of about 10,000 TPS and 3 to 5 second absolute finality; these are Hedera's own figures, not independent benchmarks. Fees are denominated in USD and paid in HBAR. Its published fee schedule lists a base HBAR crypto transfer at $0.0001, a fungible token transfer at $0.001, and a consensus message submission at $0.0008, all subject to change and to higher prices for more complex transactions. In September 2024 Hedera contributed its full codebase, including the hashgraph consensus algorithm, to Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust as the open-source project Hiero under the Apache 2.0 license, so older criticism that the algorithm is proprietary should be read against that change. Node operation and network governance still sit with the Council.

Hedera has no formal ISO 20022 standing that we can source. The key-properties table in Hedera's own documentation lists consensus, throughput, finality, fees, governance, EVM compatibility, and carbon footprint, and does not list ISO 20022. ISO 20022 is a financial messaging standard, and a blockchain does not need to be certified against it. Hedera's Consensus Service publishes ordered, timestamped, verifiable messages to a topic, which makes it usable as an audit log for financial applications, but that is a capability rather than a certification. The site therefore treats Hedera's ISO 20022 tie as adjacent, not formal.

Real-world traction centers on tokenization and institutional pilots. Archax, a UK FCA-regulated digital asset exchange, issued tokenized units of an Aberdeen Investments money market fund and tokenized UK gilts on Hedera, and Aberdeen and Lloyds Banking Group used them as collateral in FX trades. In Project Acacia, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre named Hedera among the platforms on which pilot wholesale CBDC would be issued, and the May 2026 final report records use cases on both public and private Hedera instances, including Australian Payments Plus's HashSphere instance. EQTY Lab's Verifiable Compute, built on Intel and NVIDIA hardware, anchors attestations of AI operations to the Hedera Consensus Service. Avery Dennison announced in May 2022 that its atma.io connected product cloud would use Hedera services to account for carbon emissions at item level, and DOVU runs a carbon-credit platform on Hedera. The Canary HBAR ETF (ticker HBR) began trading on Nasdaq on October 28, 2025, and in March 2026 the SEC and CFTC named HBAR as an example of a digital commodity in their joint interpretation.

Hashgraph, a company that builds on Hedera, unveiled HashSphere on March 31, 2025 (in beta at the time) as a private, permissioned network built with Hedera technology that connects to Hedera and other EVM ecosystems. Hashgraph also created the Hedera Enterprise Adoption Team (HEAT), which is meant to move Council-member proofs of concept into production.

Watch whether Hedera can convert enterprise pilots into production deployments with real transaction volume. The Governing Council is impressive on paper, but council membership does not by itself equal active on-chain usage. Also watch HashSphere adoption: private networks that connect to Hedera are a commercial bet, and this page does not assume they will translate into demand for HBAR.