What is Hedera (HBAR)? Hashgraph, the corporate council and what HBAR is used for

Hedera is a public network for digital assets that does not chain its transactions together in blocks but orders them with a method called hashgraph. HBAR is the associated cryptocurrency: every transfer, every token and every message on the network is paid for in HBAR, and HBAR holders can use it to back a consensus node. Hedera is governed by a council of large companies that sets the rules and the fees. That design is precisely what sets Hedera apart from Bitcoin and Ethereum, where no one fills such a council.

The price stood at around $0.073 on October 29, roughly €0.065. That gives HBAR a market capitalisation of just over $3.2 billion and ranks it 33rd among the largest cryptocurrencies. Over the previous month the price lost almost 30 percent, and over the year just over 64 percent. The all-time high of $0.569 dates from September 2021, five years ago. This article explains what lies behind the network and gives no price targets.

Hedera at a glance: a public network with hashgraph instead of blocks

A conventional blockchain collects transactions in a block, attaches that block to the previous one and repeats the process at fixed intervals. Hedera works differently. The network uses a directed acyclic graph, or DAG: a data structure in which each entry refers to several predecessors without forming a single chain. Any node can submit a transaction at any time, and the order is calculated afterwards from the mutual references.

The practical difference lies in finality. On Bitcoin, a payment is considered secure only after several block confirmations, because a block that has just been written could in theory still be displaced. On Hedera there are no competing blocks that could displace one another: once the order has been calculated, it stands. The network assigns a consensus timestamp in the process, a time for each entry confirmed jointly by all nodes.

Hedera describes itself as a public proof-of-stake network with hashgraph consensus. Proof of stake means that a node's weight in voting depends on the amount of HBAR staked to it, not on its computing power. There is therefore no energy consumption of the kind seen in bitcoin mining.

Gossip about gossip: how hashgraph consensus works without electing a leader

The method behind Hedera is called gossip about gossip. Each node tells randomly chosen other nodes what it has heard, and also tells them from whom it heard it. That second part is the core: because every message carries its own history of how it spread, after a short time every node knows not only all transactions but also the route by which each one reached it.

From this history, the order can be derived mathematically without the nodes having to vote with each other again. Hedera calls this virtual voting, because each node calculates on its own how the others would have voted. There is no leader proposing a block, and therefore no point at which a single operator could shift the order in its favour.

A transaction is considered final once nodes holding more than two thirds of all staked HBAR have processed it. This two-thirds threshold is the usual security limit for Byzantine fault tolerance, that is, the question of how many malicious or failed participants a network can withstand. The code for the method is now open source and is maintained as a vendor-neutral project under the name Hiero.

33 companies on the Governing Council: who decides on Hedera

Fees, software releases and the use of the HBAR reserve are decided not by holders at large but by the Hedera Governing Council. According to the council itself, it comprises 33 organisations from 13 industries. The timeline on the same page, however, lists some 40 names that have joined since 2019, and other sources give 34 or a cap of 39 seats. The range reflects the fact that members also leave; a membership count from any single report should therefore not be taken as permanent.

The names are the real point. The council includes Google, IBM, Boeing, FedEx, Dell Technologies, LG Electronics, Accenture, ServiceNow, Ubisoft, Japan's Nomura, Singapore's DBS Bank, the utility Électricité de France, Spain's Repsol, the law firms DLA Piper and Dentons, University College London, the London School of Economics and Deutsche Telekom. Under the council's rules, each member may serve at most two consecutive terms of three years each.

The council is at once Hedera's strongest selling point and its most frequent point of criticism. For a company that wants to put a supply chain or payment network on public infrastructure, a named, accountable group of operators is an advantage over an anonymous field of miners. For investors who see decentralisation as a value in itself, the same group is a concentration risk. How strongly the council moves the price became clear in September, when a listing linked to IBM lifted the price 27 percent within a day, and in October, when the composition of the council itself became the story.

Three of the 25 consensus nodes are in Germany

Who runs the network can be looked up publicly on Hedera, and the list is shorter than many expect. The mainnet runs on 25 consensus nodes. Operators are mostly council members, and the locations are spread around the world: Singapore, Iowa, Tokyo, Helsinki, Kuwait City, São Paulo and others.

For German readers, the location detail is more interesting than the total. Three of these 25 nodes are in Germany: one in Berlin, operated by Deutsche Telekom, one in Frankfurt under Tata Communications and one in Falkenstein in the Vogtland region, operated by the London School of Economics. More than one in ten of the network's consensus nodes is therefore on German soil, and the German telecoms group is not merely a council member but also an operator.

Together, all nodes carry around 10.3 billion HBAR in staked balances. With 44.3 billion HBAR in circulation, that is just under 23 percent. Deutsche Telekom's Berlin node, with 45 million HBAR of its own stake, sits at the upper limit of what individual operators deposit there.

HBAR has a fixed maximum supply of 50 billion units

The maximum supply of HBAR is fixed at 50 billion units, all of which were created at launch. Around 44.3 billion are in circulation; the rest sits in the network's reserve and is released by council decision. No new HBAR is created: there is no mining and no ongoing inflation, but there is dilution as long as the reserve is being drawn down.

This point is often overlooked. Bitcoin's supply is also capped, but new units enter circulation predictably over decades. On Hedera, a body decides when and how much leaves the reserve for the market. Anyone assessing the price should therefore look not only at circulating supply but also at the decisions on the reserve.

Fees fixed in dollars: $0.0001 for a transfer

Fees are Hedera's technical selling point: set in dollars and settled in HBAR at the prevailing price. According to the network's fee schedule, a simple HBAR transfer costs $0.0001, transferring a token created on Hedera costs $0.001, and submitting a message to the Consensus Service costs $0.0008.

Fixing prices in dollars rather than in HBAR has a consequence that matters for companies and cuts both ways for holders: a developer knows what a million transactions will cost, regardless of where the price stands. If the price falls, the same transaction requires more HBAR, and demand for HBAR from usage rises in purely arithmetic terms. If the price rises, it falls.

The price for Consensus Service messages was not always this high. It was originally $0.0001 and was raised eightfold, which the council justified with the long-term sustainability of the network. The network's fee page lists the higher figure, while elsewhere its own documentation still gives $0.0001 per message. If you are working with the numbers, use the schedule rather than the overview page, and allow for the fact that all fees are subject to change.

Token Service and Consensus Service: what companies use the network for

Hedera offers its functions as built-in services, not just as code that someone has to write themselves. Three of them matter in practice.

The Hedera Token Service creates and manages tokens, both fungible ones such as a euro stablecoin and non-fungible ones such as a collectible. The rules, such as who may freeze or mint more, are built into the service and do not have to be programmed. The Hedera Consensus Service provides an ordered, tamper-proof log: whoever submits a message receives a shared timestamp on it. This is used for audit trails, for example to record when a batch left a warehouse. The network cites more than 10,000 operations per second for this service. On top of that come smart contracts, self-executing agreements written in Ethereum's Solidity language that can access the other two services through system contracts.

This design explains why the council includes logistics groups, network operators and law firms rather than trading platforms. Hedera sells less a currency than a ledger that several companies can rely on without handing the database to any one of them.

HBAR staking has no lock-up period, so balances stay liquid at all times

In staking, a holder assigns their balance to a consensus node and thereby increases its weight in consensus. The difference from many other networks lies in flexibility: according to the network's documentation, there is no lock-up period, and staked balances remain available at all times. The coins never leave the holder's control; they are merely assigned.

The council sets the reward rate and changes it on mainnet, so there is no fixed rate. Rewards are not paid continuously but on certain events, for example when the holder switches node or changes the staked amount. Unclaimed rewards remain available for up to 365 days. If you are considering staking, it makes sense to compare the terms with those of other networks before choosing a route.

For tax purposes, staking in Germany is no side issue. Rewards count as other income at the moment they are received and are taxed at the personal rate if, together with other income of this kind, they reach €256 a year. That is a different calculation from the later sale of the coins.

How investors in Germany can get HBAR

Three routes lead to an HBAR holding, and they differ markedly in cost, custody and tax.

The first route is buying directly on a trading platform with a euro pair. Which platforms list HBAR against the euro and what an order costs there is set out in our guide to buying HBAR from October 29; the difference between providers there ran into double-digit HBAR amounts per €100 invested. Since 2025, another important criterion is whether the provider is authorised under the European MiCA regulation, the EU's single rulebook for crypto-assets.

The second route is an exchange-traded product. For HBAR there are certificates from European issuers that can be held in a securities account like any other security. Management fees on these products are well above zero and eat into returns; in exchange, you do not need to handle custody yourself. How these products differ from a direct purchase in tax and costs is a separate question, which we cover in our piece on exchange-traded crypto products for German securities accounts.

The third route is self-custody. HBAR can be held in a wallet to which only the owner has the key, and common hardware devices support the network. What the devices cost and how they differ is covered in our hardware wallet comparison. This route is no obstacle to staking, because the balance stays in your own account when assigned to a node.

Tax in Germany: the one-year rule under Section 23 EStG also applies to HBAR

For tax purposes, HBAR is an "other asset" within the meaning of Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act (EStG), just like bitcoin. This gives rise to the rule that moves the most money for German investors: if you hold HBAR for more than a year and then sell, you pay no tax on the gain. If you sell within the year, the gain is taxed at your personal income tax rate, provided all private capital gains for the year together reach €1,000. This exemption limit has applied since 2024 and is not an allowance: if it is exceeded, the entire gain is taxable.

A disposal includes not only a sale for euros but also an exchange into another cryptocurrency or a stablecoin. The one-year period runs separately for each purchase, and the order matters when matching purchases and sales. If you buy and sell in several places, you therefore need a clean record; which tools can provide it is covered in our comparison of tax and portfolio tools.

Whether the one-year rule stays as it is remains open: a reform has been under negotiation in Berlin for months without any law being passed. For the current year, the period applies unchanged. In case of doubt about a specific case, the tax office decides, not a guide.

The case against Hedera: down 64 percent in a year and a council in which holders have no say

A profile that lists only strengths helps no one. Three objections to Hedera can be backed up with facts.

First, the price performance. A loss of just over 64 percent in a year and an all-time high five years in the past are a finding, not a matter of interpretation. Proximity to large corporations has not so far translated into a sustained rise in the price, and the price moves after council news each lasted only days.

Second, governance. An HBAR holder has no voting rights. Fees, reserve and software releases are decided by the council, and anyone not sitting on it cannot push anything through on the network. For investors looking for exactly this independence from committees, Hedera is the wrong network.

Third, the dependence on demand from usage. Because fees are fixed in dollars, demand for HBAR from operations grows only if more operations actually take place. If corporate usage does not broaden, the technology alone will not carry the price. The network publishes reliable usage figures for individual services only in part, which makes assessment harder.

Hedera (HBAR): the council carries the network, not the price

Hedera is an infrastructure bet on enterprise applications, backed by a named group of operators and by fixed fees in dollars. If you find that convincing, proceed in three steps.

1. First, check which trading platform lists HBAR against the euro and whether it is authorised under MiCA. An assessment of providers is available in our crypto exchange comparison.
2. Then decide where the holding should sit. For amounts you plan to hold for longer, self-custody is the safer place; the devices for it are listed in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Finally, set up your records before the first sale comes up. Purchase date, quantity and price later decide the one-year period; suitable tools are listed in the tax tool comparison.

(As of October 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)