What is Hedera (HBAR)?
- Author
- CRYPTO PORT Editorial
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 6 min
In short
Hedera is a public network launched in 2019 that orders transactions with a directed acyclic graph called a hashgraph instead of a chain of blocks. It is operated by a council of large enterprises and universities that run the nodes and set policy. Fees are denominated in US dollars, reflecting its enterprise focus.
Key points
- Uses hashgraph, an asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant consensus, rather than a chain
- A council of up to 39 organisations runs the nodes on rotating terms and sets policy
- Fees are fixed in US dollar terms and paid in HBAR
- Offers token issuance, an auditable logging service and EVM-compatible contracts
Definition
A public distributed ledger that orders transactions with a directed acyclic graph called a hashgraph, with nodes operated by a council of enterprises.
Hedera was designed around what enterprises say they need from a distributed ledger: predictable finality, fees stable enough to budget against, and identifiable operators. Its premise is that typical public chains fall short on all three.
Instead of stringing blocks into a line, nodes gossip the information they receive to each other and record the history of that gossip itself. From that record, every node can derive the same ordering without sending extra voting messages — the core idea of hashgraph. It is described as asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant, with finality in seconds.
Its services fall into three groups: issuing and transferring tokens; recording arbitrary data in verifiable order, used for audit trails and supply-chain tracking; and EVM-compatible smart contracts. Fees are set in US dollars, so the real cost stays constant even as the HBAR price moves.
Governance rests with a council including Google, IBM, Boeing, LG and several universities, serving fixed terms. Not just anyone can run a node, so the network is permissioned in that respect — an advantage where enterprises want clear accountability, and a documented drawback for anyone prioritising censorship resistance.
Watch out for
- · Node operation is limited to council members, so it is not permissionless
- · Much of the HBAR supply is released into the market over time from treasury control
- · Enterprise pilots are numerous; the scale of actual production use has to be checked case by case
Frequently asked questions
Is it not a blockchain?
It is a distributed ledger, but its data structure is a graph rather than a chain of blocks. It belongs to distributed ledger technology broadly, though structurally it is not a blockchain.