Hedera is a public network for payments, tokens and smart contracts, and HBAR is the coin that keeps it running. Its ledger is not a chain of blocks but a hashgraph. Hedera opened to everyone on 16 September 2019; its main network had gone live in August 2018, but until then it was not open to the general public.
The design comes from Leemon Baird, who described the hashgraph consensus algorithm in a Swirlds technical report in May 2016 and later co-founded Hedera with Mance Harmon. Nodes keep passing on what they have heard from one another, which the report calls gossip about gossip. From that shared record, each node can calculate how the others would vote without any votes being sent, and all of them arrive at the same order of transactions. Hedera says that order is final in under three seconds.
What sets Hedera apart is who runs it. The Hedera Council, a limited liability company with room for up to 39 members, decides on the software, pricing and the treasury. Each member has one vote and can serve at most two consecutive three-year terms. Members also operate the network's nodes, so for now only approved organisations take part in consensus; the white paper describes opening it up to other operators later. Recent arrivals include the Spanish energy group Repsol, in December 2025, and FedEx, in February 2026.
All 50 billion HBAR were created at launch and are released from the treasury in stages, and the total can only change if every council member agrees. You need HBAR to pay for network services, whose fees are set in US dollars and converted at the moment of the transaction. You can also stake it to a node, which adds to that node's weight in consensus. The software is open source and has sat with the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, under the name Hiero, since September 2024.
Fees pegged to the dollar do not make HBAR itself stable: its price moves freely and can fall a long way.
Official website: hedera.com