Coin columns · Mainnet Province
Hedera: hashgraph consensus and a council of global organizations
A public ledger that orders transactions by ‘gossip’
Hedera is a public distributed ledger that orders transactions with a ‘hashgraph’ instead of a chain of blocks. Its native coin, HBAR, pays fees and is staked to secure the network.
1. Who built it
The hashgraph algorithm was invented by computer scientist Dr. Leemon Baird, who co-founded the company Swirlds with Mance Harmon to develop it. Hedera turned the technology into a public network, whose mainnet opened to everyone in September 2019. HBAR’s maximum supply was fixed at 50 billion from the start.
Its most distinctive feature is governance: a council of up to 39 term-limited organizations, whose members have included Google, IBM and Boeing, sets rules and budgets. South Korea’s LG Electronics was an early member. On the Crypto Nation map, HBAR is the city-hall tower of the Hedera chain in Mainnet Province, as few tokens live on it yet.
2. How hashgraph agrees
Nodes share information at random (gossip) and also record who heard what and when (gossip about gossip). From this history each node can compute how others would vote, so they agree on transaction order without sending votes (virtual voting). Hedera says this gives asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT): consensus holds even if some nodes misbehave or messages are delayed.
Transactions usually reach finality within seconds, and fees are set in US dollars but paid in HBAR, which keeps costs predictable. The network offers a Consensus Service (HCS) for timestamping messages, a Token Service (HTS) and EVM-compatible smart contracts. HBAR holders can stake to nodes and earn rewards.
3. Uses and changes
Hedera targets enterprise uses that need trustworthy timestamps, such as supply-chain tracking, carbon credits and payment records. In 2022 the council bought the hashgraph intellectual property from Swirlds and open-sourced the code under Apache 2.0. In 2024 the codebase moved to Hiero, a Linux Foundation project.
Groups such as the HBAR Foundation and the Swiss-based Hashgraph Association have supported the ecosystem. In late October 2025 a US exchange-traded fund (ETF) holding spot HBAR began trading. Smart contracts that work with Ethereum developer tools also help attract builders.
4. Things to know
Council members run the consensus nodes, a permissioned design critics call centralized next to Bitcoin or Ethereum, where anyone can run a node. Hedera says it will gradually open node participation; the pace remains to be seen. A council seat also does not mean a company uses Hedera at scale.
In March 2023 a smart-contract flaw was exploited to drain liquidity from some decentralized exchanges, and Hedera briefly shut its network proxies to contain the damage. Its ecosystem still has fewer tokens and apps than larger chains, and HBAR’s price can swing sharply.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.