Hedera (HBAR) runs on hashgraph, a distributed ledger technology that's technically distinct from blockchain — instead of grouping transactions into sequential blocks, it uses a 'gossip about gossip' protocol and virtual voting to reach consensus, a design its creators claim delivers higher throughput and fairer transaction ordering than traditional blockchains.
What it does
The headline numbers are genuinely strong: Hedera claims throughput in the range of 10,000-plus transactions per second with fast finality and famously low, predictable fees, figures that outperform most layer-1 blockchains on paper. It supports smart contracts (EVM-compatible since 2022), a native token service for issuing assets without custom contract code, and a consensus service for timestamping and ordering arbitrary data.
What genuinely distinguishes Hedera is governance. Rather than a foundation or a diffuse validator set, Hedera is governed by the Hedera Governing Council — a rotating group of up to 39 organisations including Google, IBM, Boeing, Deutsche Telekom and Standard Bank, each running a node and holding equal voting power regardless of size. That's brought real enterprise credibility and pilot projects in supply chain, carbon credits and identity.
Hedera has leaned hard into enterprise and institutional use cases over retail speculation — tokenised assets, carbon markets, and partnerships with corporations exploring blockchain infrastructure without wanting the permissionless chaos of Ethereum or Solana.
Risks
Hedera's governance model is also its biggest philosophical liability in crypto circles: with a fixed council of large corporations controlling consensus, it's a fundamentally permissioned network dressed in decentralisation language, and node operation has historically been limited to Council members rather than open to the public.
Hashgraph's underlying technology is patented, with Hedera's creators holding IP rights that other projects can't freely build on the way they can with open blockchain designs — an unusual position in an industry largely built on open-source composability.
Despite years of enterprise pilots and genuinely impressive technical benchmarks, HBAR has struggled to translate that into strong DeFi or retail ecosystem activity compared with Ethereum, Solana or even smaller EVM chains, leaving a persistent gap between Hedera's technical story and its on-chain usage.