Hedera

HBAR is the coin of Hedera, a public ledger governed by a council of large companies, used to pay fees and stake to its nodes.

Hedera is a public distributed ledger that uses the hashgraph consensus algorithm instead of a traditional blockchain. It was designed by Dr. Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon and opened to the public on 16 September 2019. HBAR is its native coin: it pays for transactions, token services, smart contracts and the consensus messaging service, and holders can stake it to the network's nodes.

HBAR has a fixed total supply of 50 billion; no new HBAR is created. Instead, the Hedera Council releases coins from its treasury to pay for ecosystem grants, operations, staff and earlier sale contracts. On 27 September 2026 about 43.8 billion HBAR (about 88%) had been released. The council's treasury report of 3 September 2026 forecasts released supply rising to about 47.4 billion by the end of the third quarter of 2026, based on existing commitments.

The network is run by the Hedera Council, a group of large organisations such as Google, IBM, Dell, Deutsche Telekom, LG, Nomura and FedEx. On 27 September 2026 all 29 consensus nodes were hosted by council members. Members have equal votes and term limits, but HBAR holders do not vote on protocol decisions. Running a node is therefore not open to anyone. The node software is open source under the Hiero project.

Staking on Hedera has no lock-up and no slashing (penalty for misbehaviour): staked HBAR stays in the holder's account. Rewards are capped at 2.5% a year and were about 1.9% on 27 September 2026, paid from an account funded mainly by network fees. In the US, HBAR is named as an example of a digital commodity in the SEC and CFTC interpretation of March 2026, and the Canary HBAR ETF, which holds HBAR directly, has traded on Nasdaq since October 2025.