The diversification of the Hedera ecosystem promotes HBAR market performance

Against the backdrop of fluctuations in the overall cryptocurrency market, Hedera's native token HBAR has shown a counter-trend rise. Since the low point in 2024, the price of HBAR has increased by more than six times, reaching an intra-year high of 0.29 USD in mid-July 2025. As of July 23, the price of HBAR is 0.271 USD, with a total market capitalization of approximately 13.5 billion USD.

Although HBAR is relatively low-profile in the crypto community, it is backed by strong institutional support. This round of strong upward momentum is driven by several fundamental factors, including traditional financial institutions utilizing the Hedera network for asset tokenization, continuous improvements in network performance and scalability, and the ongoing enrichment of the DeFi and real-world asset ( RWA ) ecosystem bringing actual demand for HBAR.

The Favor of Traditional Financial Institutions

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

In November 2024, a digital asset trading platform regulated by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) launched tokens for money market funds issued by three globally renowned asset management companies. These tokens have gone live on the Hedera Hashgraph mainnet, allowing institutional investors to trade traditional fixed-income products directly on Hedera's high-throughput network.

In February 2025, the Hedera Foundation announced its investment in the token of a certain international asset management company's dollar money market fund, further strengthening Hedera's position in the institutional-grade asset tokenization space.

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

On-chain data shows that large investors continue to have a positive outlook on HBAR. According to statistics from analysis firms, since October 2024, the number of large holders with between 1 million and 10 million HBAR has been steadily increasing, with wallets holding tens of millions also showing an increasingly firm trend of accumulation. This indicates that large investors maintain confidence in the long-term prospects of HBAR and provide liquidity support for the market.

Technical Iteration and Protocol Upgrade

To meet the growing application demands, the Hedera network continuously enhances its performance and functionality through periodic upgrades. On June 25 and July 23, 2025, Hedera completed the mainnet upgrades v0.62 and v0.63, respectively. These upgrades focus on improvements in the system core and operations management, without changing the core economic model of HBAR.

Taking v0.63 in July as an example, this version has added multiple 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-side source code to the Linux Foundation project Hiero, achieving full-chain open-source governance from consensus nodes to SDKs and service layers. This initiative significantly enhanced the project's transparency and community engagement.

Hedera's technological iteration follows a roadmap of "rapid iteration and continuous optimization." Each upgrade enhances the network's capacity and continuously improves the features available to developers. These stable and gradual technological advancements provide foundational support for the implementation of ecological applications and the conversion of value, creating conditions to support the actual demand for HBAR.

Governance Structure and Ecological Support

In May 2025, the Hedera ecosystem underwent significant organizational restructuring and brand updates: the HBAR Foundation was officially renamed the Hedera Foundation, and the Hedera Management Council was renamed the Hedera Council, with both operating independently under the new brand. This transformation aims to provide a clearer understanding of the organizational functions for all parties and unify the "Hedera" brand.

The Hedera Council is composed of over 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 all have equal voting rights, term limits, and a transparent nomination process, ensuring that no one can monopolize decision-making.

The new CEO of the Hedera Foundation 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 plans to launch more ecosystem integration projects and DeFi tools by 2025 to help developers and users manage digital assets more easily.

This governance reform helps to better support ecological development. The foundation provides funding and resources for developers through specialized funds in different areas such as fintech, security, and sustainability. Meanwhile, the council brings together over a hundred 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.

The Development of Stablecoins, RWA, and Consumer Applications

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

The main exchange application on the Hedera chain is a decentralized exchange based on the HBAR network. As of July 23, the exchange's trading volume in the recent 30 days exceeded $284 million, with a trading volume of $120 million in the past 7 days. In addition, there are various DeFi tools and services within the Hedera ecosystem, providing users with functions such as exchange and lending.

Stablecoins and RWA applications are also important aspects of the Hedera ecosystem expansion. Several banks have launched stablecoins such as the US dollar on Hedera. By mid-2025, the total amount of stablecoins locked on the Hedera network is expected to be approximately $212.5 million, primarily consisting of USDC.

In the field of physical assets, Hedera has also emerged with some impressive cases. A real estate asset tokenization platform has tokenized over $100 million of real estate assets on Hedera since May. At the same time, a carbon credit platform has utilized Hedera for carbon asset on-chain processing, having tokenized approximately $1.1 billion worth of carbon credits since May.

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

In summary, Hedera has attracted mainstream asset management institutions to pilot asset tokenization over the past year, relying on its high-throughput network and transparent governance; through a series of robust protocol upgrades and open-source initiatives, it has continuously improved network performance and developer experience; and it has formed a complementary ecosystem in various fields such as DeFi, stablecoins, tokenization of real assets, and consumer applications. These "hard power" factors have accumulated the actual demand for HBAR and provided support for its price performance.

Looking ahead, as more financial institutions and consumer-level applications are implemented, and as on-chain activity and user retention data are further validated, whether Hedera can consolidate its "enterprise-grade public chain" positioning and its ongoing influence on HBAR prices remains a key point to watch in the future.