What Is Hedera Hashgraph? All About HBAR Token

What is Hedera Hashgraph?

Hedera is a public distributed ledger for building and deploying decentralized applications and microservices. Hedera-powered apps can be built and run by anyone, from a single developer to a startup, a small corporation, or a huge enterprise company.

Hashgraph is not a blockchain in the sense that it’s built on a chain of blocks. It’s best to imagine it as a graph, whereby the speed of verifying transactions goes up as more transactions are added to the network.

How does Hedera Hashgraph work?

The outstanding features of Hedera Hashgraph's Blockchain include:

Sharding: The biggest distinguishing characteristic of Hedera Hashgraph is its data structure for grouping transactions, known as a hashgraph, which claims to be able to conduct more transactions at a lower cost than existing blockchains. Since launching its mainnet in 2019, Hedera Hashgraph has gone from strength to strength by multiple shards, and its claims of being able to support in excess of 10,000 transactions per second (tps) have so far been proven accurate for standard HBAR token transfers.

Smart Contracts: The Hedera Hashgraph platform supports the same object-oriented programming language that Ethereum uses, known as Solidity, which is commonly used for smart contracts.

Governance: Hedera Hashgraph is governed by the council of up to 39 prominent worldwide corporations known as the Hedera Governing Council. Those members run mainnet nodes and have an equal vote on the network and platform decisions.

Detailed information about HBAR Token

HBAR is the native, energy-efficient cryptocurrency of the Hedera public network. HBAR is used to power decentralized applications and protect the network from malicious actors.

HBAR Key Metrics

• Token Name: HBAR.
• Ticker: HBAR.
• Blockchain: Hedera Hasgraph.
• Token Standard: Solidity.
• Token Type: Utility, Governance.
• Total Supply: 50,000,000,000 HBAR.
• Circulating Supply: 14,832,972,491 HBAR.
• Transaction per second: 10,000+.
• Average Fee: $0.0001.
• Transaction Confirmation: 3-5 seconds (w/finality).
• Energy user per transaction: 0.00017 KWH.

HBAR Token Allocation

• Hedera Pre-minted Treasury: 32.4%.
• Ecosystem Development: 24%.
• Purchase Agreement: 17.4%.
• Founders & Early Executives: 13.8%.
• Swirlds: 8%.
• Employees & Service Providers: 4.4%.

HBAR Token Release Schedule

HBAR Tokens will be released over 15 years as displayed on the supply curve.

HBAR Token Sales

In August 2018, Hedera held a private sale for $0.12 per token. In this offering, 14,400,400 HBAR tokens were sold for a total of $120 million.

HBAR Token Use Cases

Network & Transaction Fee: HBAR tokens are also used to pay for transaction fees and compensate nodes for computational power and bandwidth.

Governance: HBAR tokens will be used to secure Hedera’s proof-of-stake network and to weigh votes on transactions when reaching consensus.

How to get HBAR Token

There are several ways to get HBAR Tokens:

• You can buy HBAR Tokens on Binance or Gate.io.
• Validator nodes receive staking rewards by HBAR tokens in exchange for providing the security, computation, and storage services the network needs.

How to store HBAR Token

There are numerous third-party wallets available on desktop, mobile, and hardware platforms. Many of them enable instant account creation. All known HBAR-supported wallets can be found here.

HBAR Roadmap

In order to fulfill Hedera’s mission of achieving mainstream adoption, Hedera's roadmap will evolve in terms of technology, integration with other platforms, and the introduction of incentive programs to build the ecosystem.

Q3 2021: Hedera Improvement Proposal to enable custom fees to be added to HTS tokens.

Q4 2021: 

• Enable scalable class-based NFT issuance using the Hedera Token Service.
• SDK in React is available for use.

Q1 2022:

• Improve the Hedera Smart Contract Service performance
• Support big data size volume between consensus and mirror nodes.
• Optimize core data structures to continue to support high throughput and low latency transactions.
• Streamline the developer experience starting at the Hedera Portal.

Q2 2022:

• Third-party exchanges, wallets, and custodians continue to support tokens issued with the Hedera Token Service.
• Continue on Hedera’s path to decentralization through the introduction of a set of community-run mainnet nodes.

Team, Investors, and Partners

Team 

Mance Harmon - CEO and Co-founder: He is a seasoned technology executive and entrepreneur with over 20 years of strategic leadership in global enterprises, government agencies, and high-tech startups.

Dr. Leemon Baird - Co-founder and Chief Scientist: He constructed the Hedera public network on the hashgraph distributed consensus algorithm.

Hedera Hashgraph’s co-founders Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon met while they were both in the US Airforce. They have now been working together for 25 years.

Investors

The company has raised a total of $125 million in funding from 7 rounds and was funded by 19 investors, including Boeing HorizonX Ventures, Tata Communications, BlacTower Capital, Vestinwolf Alternatives, among others. Boeing HorizonX Ventures, Tata Communications, BlacTower Capital, Vestinwolf Alternatives, among others.

Partners

The council of up to 39 prominent worldwide corporations governs their network. The council represents a diverse range of industries, with several well-known companies represented. With such a wide group of industry participants, Hedera Hashgraph is able to gain fresh viewpoints on industry difficulties.

At the time of writing, Hedera Hashgraph Network's council members include Boeing, Google, Chainlink Labs, Deutsche Telekom, LG, Dentons, Nomura, and many other well-known companies.

Is HBAR a good investment?

Recently, at the beginning of September 2021, the Hedera Hashgraph ecosystem announced an incentive package of 10 billion HBAR - 20% of the total token supply of the project to develop the Hedera ecosystem. The incentive program for the ecosystem can be an important driver to promote the development of Hedera Hashgraph.

Hedera's ecosystem currently has over 60 initial ecosystem partners, but most of these organizations have a non-blockchain core business. As such, the potential of the project will depend on whether these businesses can allocate resources to focus on developing the blockchain sector and when to bring these products to their customers.

With many Layer 1 Blockchains being released recently, competition for market share is inevitable. However, the enterprise segment still lacks many platforms to engage in this area, therefore Hedera will have the advantage of being a leader for future developments.

Disclaimer: All the information in this article is only for information purposes and should NOT be considered investment advice. Investing in Crypto contains hugely high risks, and you should only invest the fund you are willing to lose.

Similar Projects?

By looking at similar projects, you can compare Hedera’s product quality and the possibility of future price increase. Other projects that also provide similar Layer 1 Blockchain services as Hedera include: Near, Solana, Cosmos, Casper Network, etc.