Hedera history: hashgraph and its governing council
Hashgraph instead of blocks
Leemon Baird described hashgraph in 2016. Nodes in a hashgraph pass information about transactions to each other at random, and every node can work out the order of events from that record, without miners or blocks. Baird and Mance Harmon turned the algorithm into Hedera.
A council in place of anonymous validators
Hedera handed control to a governing council of large organisations, and members have included Google, IBM, Boeing and Deutsche Telekom. Each member runs a node and votes on changes. That design gives corporate users known operators and gives critics grounds to call the network centralised.
2019: open access and a peak in 2021
The network opened to the public in September 2019. HBAR has a fixed supply of 50 billion tokens, and about 44 billion are in circulation. The price reached its all-time high of 0.569 dollars on 15 September 2021, in the same rally that lifted most of the market.
The code goes to the Linux Foundation
Hedera opened its source code and in 2024 handed it to the Linux Foundation, where it continues as the Hiero project. Developers outside the council can now propose changes through the foundation.