What is Hedera?

HBAR has secured its place in many traders’ portfolios. However, before you Trade HBAR, it is vital that you understand what you are investing in.

Regarding the distributed economy, Hedera is the go-to, enterprise-grade public network that lets anybody build robust decentralized apps (DApps).

It is meant to be a more equal and efficient system that does away with the drawbacks of previous blockchain-based systems, such as sluggish performance and unreliability.

It started its funding process with an ICO in August of 2018 and gave the public access to its mainnet for the first time in September of 2019. During the ICO, participants could buy the platform's native utility token (HBAR) at a discount.

With respect to the public Hedera network, the HBAR token serves a dual purpose

Hedera's services, including smart contracts, file storage, and normal transactions, are all powered by HBAR. Second, staking HBAR tokens helps keep the network safe by rewarding users who contribute to the platform's security.

Hedera (HBAR) is the token of the Hedera Hashgraph platform, an alternative to blockchain technology that aspires to be faster, more efficient, and more secure.

The architecture of the Hedera Hashgraph system was built from scratch to suit the needs of the undertaking. With its foundation in a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) paradigm, Hedera is expected to safeguard the network against malicious actors and accelerate the speed with which transactions are verified on the network. Its ecosystem consists of the hashgraph consensus method and the global enterprise governing body.

Hedera's usage of a new consensus mechanism called hashgraph sets it apart from previous blockchains, according to the project website. The goal is to improve the TPS (transactions per second) indicator and reduce the time it takes to process and execute a transaction. Hashgraph is said to improve traditional transaction times, costs, and scalability.

Core network services by Hedera:

Consensus Service (HCS). In HCS, clients communicate via messages to establish a standard time reference and send it in the correct sequence. The state is saved offline in this setup, and the individual users define security and access policies.

Hedera Token Service (HTS). HTS allows users to make and manage their own tokens. Tokenization is integrated right in.

The purpose of Hedera's hashgraph is to make financial transactions more rapid. More than that, the network is optimized for high-throughput tasks like micropayments, data integrity, and tokenization.

Similar to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the Hedera network hosts a virtual machine that can generate Solidity code for smart contracts. Hedera also provides Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering checks as standard.

Hedera is a decentralized ledger system from a technological standpoint. It is a consensus algorithm—more specifically, a hashgraph—in which users agree on the sequence in which transactions should take place. But Hedera is not a blockchain in the traditional sense. It is unique in its operation and characteristics. When using a hashgraph, all transaction forks are combined, no blocks or their equivalents are wasted, and all are utilized to attain consensus

The network's Gossip-about-Gossip protocol stands out among other aspects. Hedera's creator claims that the system's nodes use the Gossip protocol to anonymize information about themselves via a hashgraph. Within a short amount of time, all of the nodes in a cluster will know each other. After that, a particular data structure is built. You may consider it a payload of transactions, a timestamp, a digital signature, and hashes to those structures.

Hedera Hashgraph operates under a unique decentralized governance model. The Governing Council makes all the major decisions, such as those involving pricing policy, software upgrades, and wealth management.

How is Hedera different?

Hedera Hashgraph is not a cryptocurrency platform built on a blockchain like most others. Instead, it unveils the Hashgraph, a brand-new form of distributed ledger technology.

Many blockchain-based alternatives are inferior to it in performance, cost, and scalability, but this one is superior because of the use of this technology. An average Hedera transaction takes less than five seconds to complete and costs less than USD 0.0001. Compared to the 5-20 TPS that most common proof-of-work (PoW)-based blockchains can process, Hedera Hashgraph says it can process more than 10,000 TPS.

How many HBAR coins are there?

The maximum number of HBAR coins that will ever be created is 50 billion. Hedera announces the schedule for releasing new HBAR tokens in periodic updates.

According to information provided by Hedera, the two creators of the project were each awarded a coin grant of two billion HBARs (or 4% of the entire supply). These coins have a six-year vesting schedule.

Hedera's other top executives (who started working there before 2018) have received coin grants of between $250 million and $300 million. The vesting schedule for these lasted till December 2021. There will reportedly be 17.03 billion HBAR in circulation by 2025, or around 34% of the total supply, as stated in Hedera's Economics Whitepaper (released in June 2020).

Network security

To ensure the safety of its network, Hedera Hashgraph employs a revolutionary consensus system called Hashgraph consensus. For this, a rotating governing council of up to 39 highly diverse groups from 11 industries is used. This group oversees the Hedera codebase, casts votes on significant platform changes, and runs the first public network nodes.

Hedera employs a unique proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol that enables HBAR users to stake their resources to aid in the network's security. There are proposals to move away from the current structure, in which all Hedera nodes are governed by Hedera or members of the governing council, and instead adopt a permissionless model in the future.

With its current security configuration, Hedera can achieve asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (ABFT), which means it can guarantee the timing and order of a group of transactions even if some data is delayed or lost

Founders

The creators of Hedera Hashgraph are Mance Harmon and Dr. Leemon Baird. Hedera's current principal researcher, Dr. Leemon Baird, is well recognized as the original backer of the hashgraph distributed consensus technique.

Baird served as a senior research scientist at the Academy Center for Cyberspace Research before developing Hedera Hashgraph. He has more than a decade of expertise in computer science and security. At Swirlds Inc., a platform for creating decentralized applications (DApps), he is both a co-founder and the chief technology officer.

However, Hedera's CEO, Mance Harmon, is a seasoned technology executive and entrepreneur. Over the course of his career, which spans close to two decades, Harmon has held many senior positions at notable companies. As with Dr. Leemon Baird, Mance Harmon is co-founder and CEO of Swirlds Inc.

Where can you buy GRT?

HBAR is available on the licensed cryptocurrency exchange CryptoForce and several other national and international exchanges.

Disclaimer: Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and subject to market, technical, and regulatory risks. Crypto trading requires one’s own diligence, and Cryptoforce will not be responsible for any losses incurred. Any information provided here should not be regarded as Cryptoforce’s technical or financial advice