HBAR

Hedera · Council-governed hashgraph L1 (permissioned consensus nodes)

32 /100

T4Speculative · #40 of 77

No engine yetTwo-way ↘medium likelihoodReviewed Oct 23, 2026

DemandSoundnessDurability

9 of 4514 of 409 of 15

Key facts

SupplyFloat 89% of issued supply

Circulating 44.33B, 89%
Locked or unvested 5.67B, 11%
Max 50.00B

FDV / market cap

1.1x

$3.9B / $3.4B

Market cap

$3.4B

Price $0.077, 7d −7.4%

Market data: CoinGecko, Oct 24, 2026. Scores reviewed Oct 23, 2026.

Assessment

Hedera is a fast, cheap network with blue-chip governance, but the token has no claim on activity and the activity itself is small and shrinking. Fees are a few hundred dollars a day and go to node operators, nothing is burned, and staking yield is paid out of a pre-funded pool that the Council's ecosystem side has to keep topping up. Every HBAR was allocated by the issuer: SAFT buyers bought at $0.001 to ~$0.11 in accredited-only rounds, founders, team and Swirlds took about a quarter, and the Council still holds 11.9% unreleased with a 3.99B release forecast for Q4 2026. Security rests on 30 council-selected corporate nodes that approve and sign every upgrade, with no permissionless path on the roadmap, and the Council cut user access during the Mar 2023 exploit. The supply cap and seven years of operation are real, and US access exists through one spot ETF of ~$63M, but on-chain business fell hard over the year (stablecoins down 84%, TVL down 64%).

How value reaches holders

None from fees. Since the fee collection account 0.0.802 went live (Feb 2026), every fee except node fees has gone to the node reward account 0.0.801, because its balance (~0.54M HBAR) sits below the 1M HBAR floor set by HIP-1064; it pays ~11K HBAR a day to the 14 council nodes that accept rewards, and the staking and treasury accounts received no daily fee share. Nothing is burned. Fees are tiny: ~6.9K HBAR a day (~$550) and ~$0.28M over the trailing year. Staking yield (max ~1.86% a year now) is paid from account 0.0.800, a pre-minted pool that was refilled with 250M HBAR on Oct 22, 2025 from a released-supply account and pays ~130 to 160M HBAR a year, so it is a release of existing supply, not fee income. Supply is fixed at 50B since genesis; the Council still holds 5.97B unreleased and forecasts 3.99B of releases in Q4 2026

Score anatomy

Demand

9 / 45: the stronger of two routes, plus adoption

Why would anyone hold it: does value reach the token, and is the network or product used today?

Holder routing engine input

Nothing is burned and no fee share reaches stakers today: fees beyond node fees refill the node reward account 0.0.801 (below its 1M HBAR floor), and the de minimis rule caps routing at 1

Approved or designed but inert, indirect sinks only, or flows into a treasury or endowmenthigh confidenceHow this is scored

Revenue reality engine input

Network fees were ~$0.28M over the trailing year (DefiLlama, vs ~$0.80M the year before), about 6.9K HBAR a day in Sep to Oct 2026 per the fee collection account

Under $0.5M/yr, or emissions-subsidized onlyhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Monetary usage engine input

Pays gas on a small economy: Hedera DeFi TVL ~$32M and stablecoins ~$26M; HBAR collateral in Hedera lending is ~$4M, mostly staked HBARX, so no measurable monetary use beyond fees

Pays its own network's fees (gas never counts higher, whatever the size of the economy)medium confidenceHow this is scored

Adoption ×3

Hedera fees $0.28M TTM (-65%), stablecoins $0.03B (-84%) and TVL $0.03B: negligible and fading

Marginal or fading: negligible use for its size, usage down 60%+ year on year, or a lost forkhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Two routes, the stronger counts

Revenue 0, minus 4 for routing 1 = cash flow 0. Money use 1. The engine is the stronger route: 1.

Soundness

14 / 40

Can a long-term holder trust the rules: supply, float, distribution and control?

Supply discipline ×3

Zero issuance and no mint function since the 50B genesis, but the ~30-member Council that runs every consensus node also approves and signs every upgrade, so the consensus set itself holds the supply rules

1-3%/yr on a published curve, or 3-7%/yr under a hard cap with halvingsmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Float and unlocks ×1

88.1% released (44.03B), but the Council still holds 5.97B unreleased (11.9%) on a rolling one-quarter forecast: 3.99B is forecast for Q4 2026 vs 1.46B actually released in the last four quarters

0.5-1.5% per month, or large foundation or treasury holdings without a schedulemedium confidenceHow this is scored

Distribution ×2

No open sale or mining: SAFT buyers (accredited only, $0.001 to ~$0.11 per HBAR) got 25.4%, founders, team and Swirlds ~24%, ecosystem funds 50.6%; the Council still directs 11.9% unreleased

Insiders received over 50%, or one organization directs over 30% todayhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Decentralization and security ×2

Consensus runs on 30 nodes chosen by the Governing Council, which approves and signs every upgrade and freeze; it cut user access during the Mar 2023 exploit; no permissionless nodes on the roadmap

A halt, rollback or exploited consensus bug in the last 24 months, attack cost under $10M, or a foundation-selected validator set or small multisig can halt or upgrade with no meaningful exit windowmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Durability

9 / 15

Is it big, proven and reachable by institutions?

Scale ×1

$3.5B market cap (band 4), $107.1M/day median volume (band 4), no flags.

Major: $1-10B market cap and $50M/day+How this is scored

Track record ×1

Open access since Sep 2019 (7 years) through an 80%+ drawdown (-86% from the 2021 high), but the Council turned off mainnet proxies on Mar 9, 2023 during an exploit, a coordinated halt inside the 5-year window

3-5 years, or a rollback, coordinated chain-wide halt or restart, or a $50M+ exploit in the last 5 yearshigh confidenceHow this is scored

Institutional access ×1

One US spot ETF: Canary HBR, ~$63.4M on Oct 22, 2026; Grayscale withdrew its Hedera Trust ETF registration on Aug 7, 2026

One US spot ETF, or US ETFs under $500Mhigh confidenceHow this is scored

What would move it up

To reach T3 Mixed, 3 gates are still open:

Score 32needs 40(open)
Value engine 1needs 2(open)
Adoption 1needs 2(open)
Supply 3gate 1(met)

Tier outlook · next trigger Dec 31, 2026

Two-way ↘medium likelihood

Q4 2026 treasury report: whether the 3.99B forecast (3.8B ecosystem program) leaves Council accounts and where it goes
Staking pool 0.0.800 at 130.7M HBAR, roughly 10 months at the current payout: a new top-up or a reward cut
Community or permissionless consensus nodes (not on the roadmap) and council membership changes
Annual fees back above $0.5M (revenue 1) and whether any fee share returns to the staking account
Hedera stablecoin supply ($26M, down 84% year on year) and DeFi TVL ($32M)

Research report

Oct 23, 2026 · source confidence 75%

Hedera is a proof-of-stake network that reaches consensus with the hashgraph algorithm on 30 nodes, each run by a member of its Governing Council, a group of large companies and institutions that also approves and signs every software upgrade. All 50 billion HBAR were created at launch and there is no mint function, so supply is fixed in practice; what changes is how much the Council has released. About 88% is released today, and the Council still holds about 5.97 billion HBAR, with 3.99 billion forecast for release in the fourth quarter of 2026, though recent quarterly releases ran far below forecast. Holders have no claim on network activity. Transaction fees are very low by design, about $280,000 over the past year, nothing is burned, and since early 2026 nearly all fees have funded rewards for node operators. Staking yield, currently under 2% a year, is paid from a pre-funded reward account that was refilled with 250 million HBAR in October 2025. The original distribution went to private SAFT buyers, founders, staff, Swirlds and ecosystem funds, with no open public sale. Hedera has run since 2019, and in March 2023 the Council cut user access during an exploit. One US spot ETF holds about $63 million, while stablecoins and DeFi deposits on the network fell sharply over the past year.

Structure (28 facts)

Chain: Hedera mainnet: hashgraph aBFT consensus on 30 permissioned consensus nodes run by Governing Council members (mirror node, 2026-10-23); software v0.7x, codebase contributed to the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust as Hiero (2024); mirror and block nodes open to anyone
What it is: general-purpose L1 (HBAR transfers, Hedera Token Service, Consensus Service, EVM smart contracts); governed by Hedera Hashgraph LLC, whose members are the Council (LLCA allows up to 39, one vote each, majority for most actions)
Genesis: 50B HBAR created at network launch (beta Aug 2018, open access 2019-09-16); no mining, no open public sale
Max supply: 50,000,000,000
Released supply: 44,027,157,622 HBAR (88.05%) per mirror node /network/supply on 2026-10-23; Council treasury report: 43,853,019 kHBAR released at Q3 2026 end (87.71%)
Unreleased council holdings: ~5.97B HBAR (11.9% of supply) in Council-controlled account ranges (0.0.2, 0.0.42 to 0.0.87, 0.0.99 to 0.0.100, 0.0.200 to 0.0.750); 0.0.2 holds 16.6M; most of the rest sits in 0.0.4xx accounts staked to council nodes with rewards declined
Release history: actual releases (kHBAR): Q1 2025 3,967,864 (incl. 3.5B to the Hedera Foundation on 2025-02-14), Q2 2025 159,934, Q3 2025 12,968, Q4 2025 383,782, Q1 2026 526,737, Q2 2026 186,745, Q3 2026 357,854 (1.46B over the last four quarters, ~0.28% of float a month). Forecast Q4 2026: 3,989,540 kHBAR (3.8B Ecosystem Development Program, 153M Council operations, 36M coin plan), which would take released supply to 95.69%. Earlier quarterly forecasts of ~4B were largely not executed. 'Released' means moved to an account not controlled by the Council (often the Foundation), not sold
Genesis allocation: Council treasury report categories: Purchase Agreements 12.70B (25.40%, SAFTs, SAFT Exchange Offer, token purchase agreements); Network Governance and Operations 8.12B (16.23%, coin plan for founders, executives, employees and contractors plus Council operations, incl. 780M reserved for the board); Initial Development Costs and Licensing 3.88B (7.77%, incl. Swirlds 1.01B and the hashgraph licence 2.5B); Ecosystem and Open Source Development 25.30B (50.61%)
Saft terms: Series 1 (late 2017 to Jan 2018): $4.7M from 40 buyers at $0.001 split-adjusted, 4.9B HBAR (9.8%); Series 2 (to Mar 2018): $14.5M from 80 buyers at $0.005, 2.9B (5.8%); Series 3 (Apr to Aug 2018): ~$103.8M from 778 buyers (incl. a ~$20M accredited-only crowdsale), 922M HBAR (~$0.11 average). 2020 SAFT Exchange Offer topped holders up to the USD value of their purchase, closed by a final lump sum in early 2025. The public first bought on exchanges in Sep 2019
Foundation: HBAR Foundation, renamed Hedera Foundation (CEO Charles Adkins since Dec 2024): a term sheet contemplated up to 7B HBAR; 3.5B was distributed on 2025-02-14 and on 2025-10-29 the Council reallocated the rest to the general ecosystem fund. The Foundation's current balance is not published
Swirlds: the Council bought the hashgraph IP from Swirlds in 2022 for 292,682,667 HBAR (~$76M) with a non-compete for Swirlds and co-founders Mance Harmon and Leemon Baird; Hashgraph (the former Swirlds Labs team) is paid in HBAR for development services
Emission: none: no HBAR mint exists and total supply has stayed at 50B; staking rewards come from a pre-minted pool
Mint authority: no mint function; changing supply would need a software upgrade, which Council members approve by vote and execute with Council-signed freeze/upgrade transactions; the same members run every consensus node
Staking: native staking since Jul 2022 (no slashing, no lockup); 12.98B HBAR staked, of which 4.61B is Council treasury stake that declines rewards and 8.38B is rewarded (rewards apply to at most 6.5B); max rate 5,089 tinybar per HBAR per day (~1.86% a year) on 2026-10-23, below the 2.5% cap set in Aug 2023
Staking reward pool: account 0.0.800 (no keys) was funded with 250M at launch (2022), ran down to ~0.34M by 2025-10-22 and was refilled that day with 250M HBAR in three transfers from account 0.0.897978 (a released-supply account fed by tranche accounts created 2021-11-05). Balance 130.7M on 2026-10-23 after paying ~107M since Jan 1 (~130 to 160M HBAR a year, ~$10 to 13M); docs say the Hedera Foundation has donated to it
Fees: since HIP-1259 (fee collection account 0.0.802, created 2026-02-19) fees settle daily; the documented split is ~80% to 0.0.98 (Council network admin account), 10% to 0.0.800 and 10% to 0.0.801, but under HIP-1064 all fees except node fees go to 0.0.801 while it holds less than 1M HBAR. Observed Sep 14 to Oct 23, 2026: ~6.9K HBAR a day collected, ~99% to 0.0.801, which pays ~11K HBAR a day of node rewards to the 14 council nodes that accept them (~800 HBAR each, ~$23K a year at today's price), so 0.0.801 is draining (1.0M on Jan 1 to 0.54M). No burn
Value accrual: none to holders: no burn, no buyback, no fee share to stakers at present; staking yield is a release of pre-minted supply
Revenue: DefiLlama Hedera fees: ~$281K trailing 365 days vs ~$805K the year before; quarterly $206K (Q3 2025), $118K, $53K, $63K, $69K (Q3 2026)
Security: 30 consensus nodes, each a Council member (LG, Google, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Nomura, Chainlink Labs, FedEx, Accenture, Dell, Standard Bank, Swirlds and others); consensus weight is stake capped at 450M per node, so weight is roughly equal across nodes and halting needs more than one third, about 11 nodes; node admission, upgrades and network freezes are Council decisions signed by members; the Council can also delete hosted files to remove illegal content. Planned upgrades pause the network briefly
Halt history: 2023-03-09: the Council turned off mainnet proxies, removing user access, after attackers exploited the smart contract service to drain HTS tokens from DEX pools (~$570K per CertiK), then deployed a Council-approved fix; no unplanned full outage found since (sources: status trackers show only single-node incidents in 2026)
Decentralization roadmap: community nodes were promised for 2024 (Hedera blog, Jul 2023) and did not ship; the current roadmap lists block nodes and HIP-1064 node rewards but no permissionless or community consensus nodes
Usage: ~3 to 6 transactions per second sampled on 2026-10-23 (~0.3 to 0.5M a day, mostly crypto transfers, contract calls and consensus messages); DeFi TVL $31.9M (vs $88.3M a year earlier, peak $214M Jan 2025); stablecoins $25.7M (vs $164.3M a year earlier); Bonzo Lend $4.3M, mostly HBARX
Holders: 168 accounts hold at least 50M HBAR, 36.6B in total (73% of supply), incl. the Council's 5.59B and large unlabelled custody clusters (e.g. ~40 accounts of ~187M each, nine of 175M each)
Liquidity: ~$92M a day (CoinGecko, 2.6% of market cap)
Institutional access: Canary HBAR ETF (HBR, Nasdaq, launched 2025-10-28, BitGo and Coinbase custody, 0.95% fee, no staking): $63.4M net assets on 2026-10-22 (~0.8B HBAR); Grayscale Hedera Trust ETF filed S-1 on 2025-09-09 and withdrew on 2026-08-07; Canary's multi-asset MRCA also holds HBAR
Treasury companies: no Nasdaq or NYSE HBAR treasury company found; Immutable Holdings (Cboe Canada, OTCQB) reported over 48M HBAR in Jul 2025
Market: price $0.0795, market cap $3.50B, FDV $3.97B on 2026-10-23; ATH $0.569 (2021-09-15), now -86%; ATL $0.00986 (2020-01-02); -53% over one year
Provenance gaps: the Hedera Foundation's current HBAR balance and sales are not published; owners of the largest released accounts (0.0.640701 at 3.43B, 0.0.652978 at 2.09B, 0.0.1872300 at 1.65B) are unlabelled; the recipient of the 3.8B Ecosystem Development Program is described only in secondary sources

Sources (29)

Compare with

How the ranking works and how HBAR compares: see the full ranking. This entry as JSON:

GET https://tokens.10102.io/api/v1/tokenomics?symbol=HBAR