生態多元助推Hedera：HBAR如何贏得市場青睞？

Author: Zen, PANews

As the overall crypto market fluctuates, Hedera network native token HBAR has bucked the trend: since the low point in 2024 (about $0.043), the price has risen more than 6 times, and once reached the annual high of $0.29 in mid-July 2025. As of July 23, the price of HBAR was $0.271, and the full circulation market value was about $13.5 billion.

Compared with other projects with a large number of retail investor communities, HBAR is relatively quiet in the crypto community, but it has a strong circle of institutional friends. This round of strong growth is due to a series of fundamental factors, including traditional financial institutions using the Hedera network to put assets on the chain, multiple key upgrades to the network to ensure performance and scalability, and the continuous enrichment of the DeFi and RWA ecosystems and bringing real demand for HBAR. This article will analyze these "hard power" factors one by one, and their potential impact on the future of HBAR.

A huge circle of friends in mainstream financial institutions

Since the second half of 2024, the Hedera ecosystem has attracted the attention of many institutional investors and traditional financial giants.

On November 20 last year, Archax, a digital asset trading platform regulated by the UK FCA, officially launched money market fund tokens issued by three world-renowned asset management companies, State Street Global Advisors, Fidelity International, and British insurance giant Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM). These tokens have been launched on the Hedera Hashgraph mainnet and represent investors' holdings in the corresponding funds in the form of "beneficial ownership tokens" through the Archax platform, enabling institutional investors to directly buy and sell traditional fixed-income products on Hedera's high-throughput network.

In 2025, the enthusiasm for institutional participation continued to heat up. In February 2025, the Hedera Foundation announced an investment in the tokens of the Fidelity International USD Money Fund issued by Archax (representing Fidelity Fund holdings in the form of Archax tokens), which followed the fund's pace of being listed on the Hedera chain and further strengthened Hedera's role in the field of institutional asset tokenization.

In mid-July, several community members found a batch of tokens on the Hedera mainnet that corresponded to money market funds of asset management companies such as BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, abrdn, and LGIM. Most of these tokens were created by third parties on the Internet and have not yet been officially confirmed by any institution, nor have there been official announcements or mainstream crypto media (such as CoinDesk) reporting on their actual issuance on Hedera. The industry generally believes that these "new tokens" are more of market speculation about potential products of platforms such as Archax, and are still in the rumor stage.

In addition, on-chain data shows that large investors continue to be bullish on HBAR. According to statistics from the analysis agency Hedera Watch, the number of whales holding 1 million to 10 million HBAR has continued to grow since October 2024, and wallets holding up to tens of millions of HBAR have also shown an increasingly firm trend of increasing holdings. This phenomenon shows that large investors remain confident in the long-term prospects of HBAR and also provides liquidity support for the market.

Periodic technology iteration and protocol upgrade

In terms of technical support, in order to adapt to the ever-expanding application needs, the Hedera network continues to enhance performance and functionality through periodic upgrades. For example, on June 25, 2025, Hedera completed the v0.62 mainnet upgrade, and on July 23, it upgraded to v0.63. These upgrades focus on system kernel and operation and maintenance improvements without changing the core economic model of HBAR.

Taking July's v0.63 as an example, this version adds enterprise-level features: system commands support non-zero shard IDs and domain IDs (enhanced partition deployment flexibility), added cost configuration throttling mechanism (limited the speed of administrator fee changes), and optimized the MerkleDB storage system (improved storage efficiency and accelerated node synchronization). These improvements are designed to improve the elasticity and throughput of the network and provide technical support for large-scale commercial deployment. At the same time, Hedera released tool and SDK updates (such as the new command line tool yahcli supports custom network sharding operations), enabling developers to deploy applications in a richer network topology. Through these routine upgrades, Hedera can regularly enhance performance at a low downtime cost (about 40 minutes) to ensure that ecological applications remain stable during growth.

In addition, Hedera donated all the protocol and server source code to the Linux Foundation project Hiero in September 2024, achieving full-link open source governance from consensus nodes to SDK and service layers. This move has greatly enhanced the transparency and community participation of the project. From now on, the iteration and upgrade logs of all core components can be viewed in GitHub hashgraph/hedera-protobufs and hedera-docs repositories.

Overall, Hedera's technology iteration follows the roadmap of "rapid iteration and continuous optimization". Each upgrade is intended to improve the network's carrying capacity and make the features available to developers more and more perfect. For example, after the upgrade in July, institutional users can take advantage of more flexible sharding architecture and rate management, as well as faster ledger synchronization, to improve business deployment efficiency. It is these stable and gradual technological advances that provide the underlying guarantee for the implementation of ecological applications and value conversion, create support conditions for the actual demand of HBAR, and thus form a potential positive for prices.

Governance structure and ecological support

In May 2025, the Hedera ecosystem ushered in an important organizational restructuring and brand update: the HBAR Foundation was officially renamed the Hedera Foundation, and the Hedera Management Committee was renamed the Hedera Council. The two maintained independent operations under the new brand. This change is intended to allow all parties to more clearly understand the organizational functions and unify the "Hedera" brand.

The Hedera Council is composed of more than 30 leading global organizations, covering multiple industries such as technology, aviation, communications, and finance, ensuring diversity and balance in network governance. Some representative members include Google, IBM, BitGo, Deutsche Telekom, LG, and Nomura (Nomura Holdings). All council members have equal voting rights, term limits, and an open nomination process to ensure that no one can monopolize decision-making. This multi-industry, cross-regional governance model provides a solid guarantee for the security, stability, and compliance of the Hedera network, and also lays the foundation for its "enterprise-level public chain" positioning.

According to the official statement, the new CEO of the Hedera Foundation, Charles Adkins, will focus on promoting DeFi and community innovation, and continue to support institutional adoption and tokenization. The Foundation has clearly prioritized the DeFi ecosystem - more ecosystem integration projects and DeFi tools will be launched in 2025 to help developers and users manage digital assets more easily. At the same time, the Hedera Council, under the leadership of the new chairman, continues to focus on network security and compliance governance to ensure the robustness and decentralization of the network.

This governance change will help better support the development of the ecosystem. The Foundation provides funding and resources to developers through specialized funds in different fields such as fintech, security, and sustainability. The Council brings together more than 100 leading global institutions to continuously upgrade the network and formulate policies. In addition, the clear division of labor and collaboration between the Foundation and the Council enhances the cohesion of the Hedera community and the clarity of its development direction. This integrated Hedera brand strategy and the new positioning of the leadership make the ecological construction more organized, which not only supports the incubation of new projects, but also provides institutional guarantees for the long-term development of the ecosystem.

Stablecoins, RWA and consumer applications may be the engines of continued growth

In parallel with institutional adoption and technology upgrades, Hedera's DeFi and application scenarios have also expanded significantly in recent years. According to the DappRadar report, Hedera's on-chain transaction volume reached approximately US$4.66 billion in December 2024. Although it subsequently adjusted as the market fell, it marked that the ecosystem's liquidity has entered the multi-billion dollar level.

The main exchange application on the Hedera chain is SaucerSwap, a decentralized exchange based on the HBAR network. As of July 23, according to DefiLlama data, the exchange's recent 30-day trading volume exceeded 2.84, of which the trading volume in the past 7 days was US$120 million.

In addition, the Hedera ecosystem also has a variety of DeFi tools and services such as Pangolin and HederaSwap, which provide users with functions such as exchange and lending. In order to attract more developers, the Hedera Foundation and the community also launched the developer tool "Hedera Contract Builder" in May this year, which simplifies the smart contract creation process and supports batch transactions, lowering the development threshold.

Stablecoins and RWA applications are also important aspects of Hedera's ecological expansion. Thanks to the launch of tools such as "Stablecoin Studio", it is easier for financial institutions to issue stablecoins on Hedera. So far, many banks such as Standard Bank of South Africa, Shinhan Bank of South Korea, and Cathay Bank of Cambodia have launched stablecoins such as the US dollar on Hedera. As of mid-2025, the total amount of stablecoins locked on the Hedera network is approximately US$212.5 million, mainly USDC. The growth of stablecoins has enhanced Hedera's attractiveness in areas such as cross-border payments and clearing, and also means that more financial liquidity is entering the ecosystem.

In the field of physical assets, Hedera has also seen some outstanding cases. A representative project is the real estate asset tokenization platform StegX, which has tokenized more than $100 million in real estate assets on Hedera in May. At the same time, the carbon credit platform DOVU also uses Hedera to put carbon assets on the chain, and the platform tokenized carbon credits worth about $1.1 billion in May. The high TPS and low fees of the Hedera network make it suitable for large-scale asset chaining and settlement, and its "native environmental protection" characteristics are also in line with the needs of the carbon market. These developments show that in addition to financial assets, Hedera is becoming the infrastructure for various innovative businesses such as carbon trading and real estate.

In addition, Hedera Foundation announced the launch of the "Hedera To Earn" (HTE) reward ecosystem in mid-July, unifying the three major applications of Indonesian mobile advertising platform Cashtree (20 million+ users), Mars Labs Metaverse (2 million+ users) and Berryfox into the same Web3 token economy. Users can earn HTE tokens by completing tasks on Cashtree, participating in content creation and virtual activities on Mars Labs, and mining on Berryfox, achieving cross-platform mobility and incentives. The project aims to quickly catalyze Hedera's on-chain activity and application innovation based on existing large-scale users.

In summary, Hedera has attracted mainstream asset management institutions including State Street, Fidelity and LGIM to pilot asset tokenization in the past year by relying on high-throughput networks and transparent governance; through a series of robust protocol upgrades and open source initiatives, it has continuously improved network performance and developer experience; and has formed a complementary and progressive ecological pattern in multiple fields such as DeFi, stablecoins, physical asset tokenization and consumer applications (such as SaucerSwap, StegX, DOVU and HTE). Many "hard power" factors have accumulated the actual demand for HBAR and also provided support for its price performance.

Looking ahead, with the implementation of more financial institutions and consumer-level applications, as well as further verification of on-chain activity and user retention data, whether Hedera can consolidate its positioning as an "enterprise-level public chain" and its continued impact on HBAR prices will remain key issues to watch.