Diversified Development of the Hedera Ecosystem: The Market Rise of HBAR

Against the backdrop of overall volatility in the cryptocurrency market, Hedera's native token HBAR has shown strong upward momentum. Since its low in 2024, the price of HBAR has increased by more than six times, reaching a year-to-date high of $0.29 in mid-July 2025. As of July 23, the price of HBAR is $0.271, with a total market capitalization of approximately $13.5 billion.

Despite HBAR being relatively low-profile in the crypto community, it is backed by strong institutional support. This recent surge stems from several fundamental factors, including traditional financial institutions utilizing the Hedera network for asset tokenization, multiple key upgrades to the network enhancing performance and scalability, and the ongoing enrichment of the DeFi and real-world asset (RWA) ecosystem creating actual demand for HBAR.

The Favor of Institutional Investors

Starting in the second half of 2024, the Hedera ecosystem has attracted the attention of numerous institutional investors and traditional financial giants.

In November 2024, the digital asset trading platform Archax launched currency market fund tokens issued by three globally renowned asset management companies. These tokens went live on the Hedera mainnet and represent investors' positions in the respective funds in the form of "beneficial ownership tokens" through the Archax platform, enabling institutional investors to trade traditional fixed income products directly on the high-throughput Hedera network.

In February 2025, the Hedera Foundation announced an investment in a certain international dollar currency fund token issued by Archax, further strengthening Hedera's position in the institutional-grade asset tokenization space.

In mid-July, community members discovered a batch of tokens corresponding to the money market funds of several large asset management companies on the Hedera mainnet. These tokens were mostly created by third parties and have not yet received official confirmation from institutions or coverage from mainstream media. The industry generally believes that these "new tokens" may be market speculation about potential products and are still in the rumor stage.

On-chain data shows that large holders continue to be optimistic about HBAR. According to analysis institutions, since October 2024, the number of wallets holding large amounts of HBAR has continued to grow, indicating that large investors maintain confidence in the long-term prospects of HBAR.

Technical Iteration and Protocol Upgrade

To accommodate the growing application demands, the Hedera network continues to enhance its performance and functionality through periodic upgrades. In June and July 2025, Hedera completed the v0.62 and v0.63 mainnet upgrades, focusing on core system and operational improvements.

Taking the v0.63 from July as an example, this version has added enterprise-level features such as support for non-zero shard IDs and domain IDs, adding a fee configuration throttling mechanism, and optimizing the MerkleDB storage system. These improvements aim to enhance the resilience and throughput of the network, providing technical support for large-scale commercial deployments. At the same time, Hedera has released tools and SDK updates to enable developers to deploy applications in a richer network topology.

In September 2024, Hedera donated all protocol and server source code to the Linux Foundation project Hiero, achieving full-chain open-source governance from consensus nodes to SDK and service layers. This significantly enhanced the project's transparency and community participation.

Hedera's technological iterations follow the roadmap of "rapid iteration and continuous optimization." Each upgrade has enhanced the network's capacity and increasingly refined the features available to developers. These stable and incremental technological advancements provide a foundational guarantee for the implementation of ecological applications and the conversion of value, creating supportive conditions for the actual demand of HBAR.

Governance Structure and Ecological Support

In May 2025, the Hedera ecosystem will undergo an important organizational structure adjustment and brand update: a certain foundation will officially be renamed the Hedera Foundation, and the management committee will be renamed the Hedera Council, both operating independently under the new brand. This transformation aims to enable all parties to better understand the functions of the organization and unify the "Hedera" brand.

The Hedera Council is composed of more than thirty leading organizations from around the world, covering multiple industries such as technology, aviation, telecommunications, and finance, ensuring diversity and balance in network governance. Council members enjoy equal voting rights, term limits, and a transparent nomination process to ensure that no one can monopolize decision-making.

The new CEO will focus on promoting DeFi and community innovation, while continuing to support institutional adoption and tokenization development. The foundation has clearly identified the DeFi ecosystem as a priority development direction, with more ecosystem integration projects and DeFi tools set to launch in 2025. Meanwhile, the board continues to focus on cybersecurity and compliance governance under the leadership of the newly appointed chairman.

This governance reform helps to better support ecological development. The foundation provides funding and resources to developers through specialized funds segmented by different fields. The council brings together 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.

Development of Stablecoins, RWA, and Consumer Applications

The DeFi and application scenarios of the Hedera ecosystem have seen significant expansion in recent years. By December 2024, the on-chain transaction volume of Hedera reached approximately $4.66 billion, marking that the ecosystem's liquidity has entered the tens of billions level.

The main exchange application SaucerSwap has seen a trading volume of over $284 million in the past 30 days, with a trading volume of $120 million in the last 7 days. In addition, there are various DeFi tools and services in the Hedera ecosystem that provide users with functions such as exchange and lending. To attract more developers, the Hedera Foundation and community have launched the developer tool "Hedera Contract Builder" to simplify the smart contract creation process.

In terms of stablecoins, several banks have launched stablecoins such as the US dollar on Hedera. By mid-2025, the total amount of stablecoins locked in the Hedera network is expected to be around $212.5 million, primarily in USDC. The growth of stablecoins enhances Hedera's attractiveness in areas such as cross-border payments and settlements.

The field of real assets has also seen impressive cases. The real estate asset tokenization platform StegX has tokenized over $100 million of real estate assets on Hedera. The carbon credit platform DOVU utilizes Hedera to bring carbon assets on-chain, tokenizing approximately $1.1 billion worth of carbon credits.

In addition, the Hedera Foundation recently launched the "Hedera To Earn" (HTE) reward ecosystem, unifying three major applications into the same Web3 token economy. The project aims to quickly catalyze on-chain activity and application innovation on Hedera based on the existing large user base.

Overall, Hedera has attracted mainstream asset management institutions to pilot asset tokenization through its high-throughput network and transparent governance, continuously improving network performance and developer experience, and forming a complementary ecosystem in various fields such as DeFi, stablecoins, tokenization of real-world assets, and consumer-grade applications. These "hard power" elements have accumulated the actual demand for HBAR and provided support for its price performance.

In the future, as more financial institutions and consumer-level applications come to fruition, and with further verification of on-chain activity and user retention data, whether Hedera can consolidate its "enterprise-level public chain" positioning and its ongoing impact on HBAR prices will be a key point of interest.