History of Hedera Coin
The history of the Hedera
Hashgraph (HBAR) coin is tied to the development of its underlying
technology, the Hashgraph consensus algorithm, which is an alternative
to traditional blockchain. Here is a summary of the key milestones in Hedera's
history: Invention of Hashgraph (Mid-2010s) Dr. Leemon Baird, an American computer scientist,
invented the Hashgraph consensus algorithm in the mid-2010s. The
algorithm is designed to be faster, fairer, and more secure than many
traditional blockchain solutions, achieving Asynchronous Byzantine Fault
Tolerance (aBFT). Dr. Baird, along with his business partner Mance Harmon,
formed the company Swirlds, Inc. in 2015 to hold the patents for the
Hashgraph algorithm and develop private implementations. Founding and Public Launch (2017–2018) The idea for a public distributed ledger powered by
Hashgraph began to take shape, and the entity that would become Hedera
Hashgraph (now just Hedera) was formed in 2017 by Dr. Leemon
Baird and Mance Harmon. The project was publicly launched in March 2018,
where the vision for the public network, governed by a council, was unveiled. The
HBAR cryptocurrency was fully minted at launch, with a maximum supply of
50 billion tokens, and a multi-year release schedule was set by the Governing
Council Mainnet Launch and Governance
(2019) The Hedera Hashgraph mainnet
was officially launched in 2019.The Hedera Governing Council was
established to govern the network. It's a group of up to 39 diverse, global
organizations (including major companies like Google and IBM over time) that
run the initial consensus nodes, manage the software, and vote on changes. Open Source and Ecosystem Growth In 2020, Google Cloud joined the Hedera Governing
Council. In 2022, the Governing Council voted to purchase the patent
rights to the Hashgraph algorithm from Swirlds and make the core Hashgraph
algorithm open source under the Apache License. In 2024, Hedera
transferred its source code to the Linux Foundation, where it became the
vendor-neutral, open-source project called Hiero. The HBAR Coin
The native cryptocurrency, HBAR, serves two main purposes on the Hedera
network: Network Fuel: HBAR is used by developers and users to pay for
network services, such as transferring HBAR, minting tokens (fungible and
NFTs), running smart contracts, and logging data on the Hedera Consensus
Service. Transaction fees are predictably low. Network Security: HBAR is
staked to network nodes to protect the network through its Proof-of-Stake (PoS)
consensus model, giving stakers a weighted influence on transaction processing
and rewarding them with a share of the transaction fees.
