Hedera is a network for recording transactions and running small programs, the way Ethereum or Solana are, but built and governed differently from either. It handles payments, issues tokens, and runs smart contracts, self-executing programs that live on the network and carry out an agreement automatically once its conditions are met. Hedera says it has processed more than 71 billion transactions since it launched, and on one recent day alone it handled 559,887 more. If a single day like that held for a full year, it would put Hedera somewhere around two hundred million transactions annually.

What sets Hedera apart is who is allowed to run it. Most networks like this let anyone become a validator, a computer that helps confirm and record transactions, usually by putting up collateral. Hedera does not work that way. Every validating computer on the network is operated by one of a fixed group of roughly 39 organizations, named companies, universities and other institutions, called the Governing Council. Nobody outside that group can run a node. Nobody outside that group can vote on a change to how the network works, and that includes someone holding HBAR, Hedera's own token.

Hedera calls the method it uses to order and confirm transactions "hashgraph" rather than a blockchain, a different technical approach whose patents its creators, Leemon Baird, Mance Harmon and Paul Madsen, filed before founding the company Swirlds and later Hedera itself. How hashgraph works is not what this page assesses. What it assesses is HBAR, the token, and whether someone holding it for the next ten years is holding something worth keeping.

HBAR pays for the network's own upkeep. Every transaction on Hedera costs a small fee, paid in HBAR, and that fee is what funds the computers doing the work of confirming transactions. Without a token that costs something to use, there would be nothing to stop the network from being flooded with free, worthless transactions.

HBAR also secures the network in a second way. Anyone holding HBAR can stake it, meaning they lock it up in support of one of the Council's validating computers, and in return receive a share of the rewards that computer earns. Staking does not grant a vote. It is a financial relationship, not a governance one: it can earn a holder a return, but it does not give them any say in what Hedera does next.

Both of these are real reasons for HBAR to exist that have nothing to do with anyone expecting its price to rise.

Measured over the most recent three months and projected across a full year, Hedera's network is currently earning fees at a rate of about $265,769 a year. Measured directly over the most recent twelve months, on the days that have a recorded figure, the number is $326,904. Both figures measure the same thing: the fees people pay in HBAR to use the network, added up.

Neither is a small-sample fluke. A day-by-day record of these fees going back to September 2024 shows a network that started out earning more, and has earned steadily less since. In its first weeks on record the network was taking in over ten thousand dollars a day. For most of 2025 that had fallen to one to three thousand dollars a day. By early 2026 it had fallen further still, at times below five hundred dollars a day, before ticking back up slightly in the months since.

That decline is not a data gap. Some days in the record genuinely have no fee figure at all, periods when the tool that measures Hedera's fees appears to have gone offline rather than periods where the network processed nothing, and those gaps are excluded from the totals above rather than counted as zero. What remains, on the days that were actually measured, is a real and sustained decline in what the network earns.

A portion of every fee is paid out to HBAR holders who have staked their tokens behind a Council member's validating computer, through an account the network keeps for that purpose. That much is real: staking HBAR is a way to earn something from the network's activity.

How large that portion actually is cannot be answered from the data available for this assessment. Hedera's own transaction records add up every fee collected without separating how much of each fee went to stakers, how much went to the Council member operating the node, and how much went to the network's own treasury. It is accurate to say that some money reaches HBAR holders who stake. It is not currently possible to say how much.

Beyond the network itself, a separate set of applications run on top of Hedera: lending platforms, exchanges, and other financial tools that hold user funds. The total value of the crypto held inside those applications is one common way of judging how much real, active use a network is getting.

At its peak, applications built on Hedera held $213,960,353 worth of user funds. Today, that figure stands at $53,195,969, a fall of about seventy-five percent from the peak. This is not a rounding difference or a temporary dip: it is measured against a chain-level record confirmed to belong to Hedera specifically, not borrowed from another network by mistake.

A shrinking pool of locked funds does not necessarily mean HBAR itself is worth less. It does mean the ecosystem of applications that Hedera was meant to support has, so far, not held onto the activity it once had.

Hedera's market value, the price of every HBAR in existence multiplied together, is $3,995,808,699. Its fees, annualised from the most recent three months, come to about $265,769 a year.

Divide one by the other and Hedera is priced at roughly 15,000 times its current yearly fee income. For comparison, a wireless network project this framework has previously used as its example of an extreme, speculative valuation traded at roughly 87,000 times its own annual fees. Hedera is not at that extreme, but it is much closer to it than to a business priced on what it currently earns: a market pricing something at fifteen thousand times its yearly income is pricing what it might become, not what it is doing today.

There is a real counter-argument, and it is worth stating plainly. Hedera's own numbers on total transaction volume suggest genuine, large-scale usage: over 71 billion transactions since launch, and more than half a million on a single recent day. A high price against a small fee total does not automatically mean a network is unused. It can also mean the network charges very little per transaction, by design, and Hedera does. The gap between price and fee income is real, but it does not by itself prove the network is empty.

All fifty billion HBAR that will ever exist already exists. There is nothing left to unlock, and no scheduled release still to come: the current supply and the final supply are the same number.

That supply is split four ways. About half, 49.4%, is set aside for the ecosystem and open-source development. Another 24.2% went to people who bought HBAR through purchase agreements before it was publicly tradable. 18.2% funds network governance and operations. The remaining 8.2%, the closest thing to a founder or insider share in this breakdown, covers the initial cost of building the network and its licensing.

The people who built Hedera are also, by the network's own account, no longer running it day to day. Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon, the founders named in the whitepaper, stepped down from their executive roles as of 1 May 2022.

Every decision about how Hedera works runs through the Governing Council, the same fixed group of roughly 39 institutions that operates every validating computer on the network. The Council approves every upgrade. It decides what changes and when. HBAR holders, whether they hold one token or a million, have no documented vote in any of it.

Hedera's own whitepaper says this structure was modeled on the original governance system of the company that later became Visa, founded in 1968. The whitepaper also says the Council's diversity of membership, spanning industries and countries, is meant to keep any single member from gaining control of the network on their own.

That is a stated intention, not a guarantee. Nothing in the network's design stops the Council, acting together, from deciding to change Hedera in a way its token holders would not choose for themselves. The safeguard is that thirty-nine independent institutions are unlikely to agree on something harmful, not that a token holder has any way to stop them if they did.

In March 2023, an attacker found a flaw in a low-level shortcut Hedera's smart contract system uses, called a precompile, and used it to drain funds from several decentralized exchanges built on the network. The stolen funds, roughly $600,000 across the affected exchanges, were moved off Hedera entirely through a bridging service called HashPort.

Hedera published its own detailed account of the attack and the fix that followed within days. One of the exchanges that lost funds, Pangolin, published its own account several weeks later, reaching the same total and adding detail Hedera's account did not: the time its team was first alerted, how much each individual exchange lost, and the attacker's wallet address on a separate network the stolen funds were routed through.

No comparable incident appears in the record since. The 2023 exploit remains the one confirmed loss-of-funds event tied to Hedera's smart contract system.