No.030
Hedera HBAR
The graph-shaped order-keeper that agrees by gossip instead of blocks
🎭 A council guardian who whispers through countless tendrils at once, setting the order of transactions faster and more fairly than anyone
💬 “No blocks here. I just lean over and whisper to a friend: ‘heard about this transaction? who told you?’ The whispers pile up, and pretty soon everyone agrees on the same order. Quick, and nobody gets cut in line.”
- Not a blockchain. It runs on a different design called ‘Hashgraph’, with no blocks and no mining.
- Nodes pass gossip back and forth until they all agree on the order of transactions. It's fast and the fees are tiny.
- About 30 big companies and institutions, Google Cloud and IBM among them, run it as a council. The coin is HBAR.
📖 The Story
Most crypto networks copy the same habit: scoop transactions into boxes called ‘blocks’ and stack them in one tall line. Hedera skips the boxes entirely. Its whole personality comes from one idea that a computer scientist named Leemon Baird patented back in 2015, called Hashgraph.
Picture our little spirit with no hands for stacking and no pickaxe for digging. What it has are tendrils. Each one taps a neighbor on the shoulder: “there was just a transaction like this, and who told you about it?” That second question is the trick. By gossiping about where the gossip came from, the nodes can rebuild the exact order of events without anyone refereeing. Everyone lands on the same answer, cheaply, and the network sips electricity instead of guzzling it.
On 16 September 2019 Hedera flung its mainnet open to the public, and it didn't show up alone. A council of names like Google Cloud, IBM, and Deutsche Telekom agreed to run the nodes and steer the project together. Years later, in 2024, the team handed the source code to the Linux Foundation so no single company owns the recipe. Hedera's pitch has stayed the same the whole way through: order, settled by whispers, fair to everyone in the room.
📊 Stats
🧩 How it works
Hedera has no blocks and no mining. Instead, its nodes whisper gossip to each other. “There was just a transaction like this!” As that gossip spreads as ‘gossip about gossip’, all those whispers pile up into a graph (DAG). Looking at that graph, the nodes settle the order with virtual voting, and everyone arrives at the same conclusion. This whole method is called Hashgraph.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- No blocks and no mining means it can lock in the order of transactions quickly, with very small fees
- Skipping mining also means it barely uses electricity, which is a real plus if energy use bothers you
- Having a council of established companies steer it makes the project feel stable and unlikely to vanish (and it's EVM-compatible, so Ethereum-style smart contracts run on it too)
- That same council is the catch. With a handful of big companies holding the keys, people keep asking whether it's genuinely owned by everyone or just a few
- All 50 billion HBAR already exist, so there's no endless inflation. But they're let into circulation slowly over years, and new supply landing on the market can press the price down
- Like most coins, the price can lurch hard in either direction, so don't treat it as a steady thing
🧬 Evolution Tree
Hedera isn't a coin that split off (forked) from anyone. It has no sibling coins either. It's an independent L1 original built on the unique Hashgraph consensus that Baird invented. Because it's graph-based (DAG) rather than a blockchain, it shares a flavor with the ‘non-blockchain DLT’ family like IOTA and Nano, but it doesn't directly fork from them or share a founder.
‘Non-blockchain DLT’ friends with a similar vibe: IOTA · Nano (not direct bloodline)
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is Hedera (HBAR)?
- It's a public distributed ledger (DLT) that bills itself as an alternative to blockchains. Instead of stacking blocks, it uses a method called ‘Hashgraph’, where nodes whisper gossip to each other to process transactions in a fast, cheap, and fair order. The coin you use on top of it is HBAR.
- How is Hashgraph different from a blockchain?
- A blockchain bundles transactions into ‘blocks’ and stacks them in a single line, but Hedera has no blocks and no mining. Its nodes spread information to each other using a ‘gossip about gossip’ protocol, building a graph (DAG), then settle the order with virtual voting. Because there's no mining, the goal is to use far less electricity.
- Who runs Hedera?
- A group called the Hedera Governing Council. Large companies and institutions such as Google Cloud, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, FIS, and Tata Communications run nodes and make decisions together. That setup earns it praise for being sturdy, but also the recurring question of whether a small handful of big companies hold too much control.
- How many HBAR can ever exist?
- There's a fixed cap of 50 billion (50,000,000,000 HBAR). All of it was minted at launch, so there's no permanent inflation, but it's released into the market gradually over many years, so the circulating supply can keep rising in the short and medium term. Compared with Bitcoin's hard 21 million cap or Dogecoin's unlimited supply, Hedera is ‘capped, but a large cap’.
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only (MOCK · 2026-06-04).