The Diversified Development of the Hedera Ecosystem Boosts HBAR Market Performance

Amidst the fluctuations in the overall cryptocurrency market, Hedera's native token HBAR has stood out: since its low point in 2024, the price has increased more than 6 times, reaching an intra-year high of $0.29 in mid-July 2025. As of July 23, the price of HBAR is $0.271, with a fully diluted market cap of approximately $13.5 billion.

This strong rally is driven by several fundamental factors, including traditional financial institutions using the Hedera network for asset tokenization, multiple key upgrades to the network ensuring performance and scalability, and the continuous enrichment of the DeFi and RWA ecosystems bringing actual demand for HBAR.

Institutional Investors Favor

Since the second half of 2024, the Hedera ecosystem has gained the attention of numerous institutional investors and traditional financial giants. In November last year, a digital asset trading platform regulated by the UK's FCA launched tokens for money market funds issued by three globally renowned asset management companies. These tokens have been launched on the Hedera Hashgraph mainnet, allowing institutional investors to buy and sell traditional fixed-income products directly on Hedera's high-throughput network.

As we enter 2025, the trend of institutional participation continues. In February, the Hedera Foundation announced an investment in a token from a certain international dollar money market fund issued by a trading platform, further strengthening Hedera's role in the institutional asset tokenization space.

On-chain data shows that large holders continue to be bullish on HBAR. Since October 2024, the number of large holders owning between 1 million and 10 million HBAR has been consistently increasing, with wallets holding tens of millions also showing a stronger trend of accumulation. This indicates that large investors maintain confidence in the long-term prospects of HBAR and provide liquidity support to the market.

Technical Iteration and Protocol Upgrade

To meet the growing application demands, the Hedera network continues to enhance its performance and functionality through periodic upgrades. On June 25, 2025, Hedera completed the v0.62 mainnet upgrade, and on July 23, it upgraded to version v0.63. These upgrades focus on system kernel and operational improvements, without altering the core economic model of HBAR.

Taking the v0.63 from July as an example, this version has added enterprise-level features: system commands support non-zero shard IDs and domain IDs, added a fee configuration throttling mechanism, and optimized 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 addition, Hedera donated all its protocol and service-side source code to the Linux Foundation project Hiero in September 2024, achieving full-chain open-source governance from consensus nodes to SDK and service layers. This significantly enhanced the project's transparency and community participation.

Governance Structure and Ecological Support

In May 2025, the Hedera ecosystem will undergo significant organizational restructuring and brand updates: the HBAR Foundation will officially be renamed the Hedera Foundation, and the Hedera Management Committee will be renamed the Hedera Council, with both operating independently under the new brand. This transformation aims to provide clearer understanding of organizational functions and to 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 all enjoy 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, helping developers and users manage digital assets more easily.

DeFi, Stablecoins and RWA Applications

The DeFi and application scenarios of the Hedera ecosystem have seen significant expansion in recent years. In December 2024, the transaction volume on the Hedera chain reached approximately $4.66 billion. Although there was a subsequent adjustment as the market receded, this marks the entrance of ecosystem liquidity into the tens of billions level.

The main exchange application on the Hedera chain is the decentralized exchange SaucerSwap 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 last 7 days. In addition, there are various other DeFi tools and services in the Hedera ecosystem that provide users with functions like exchanges and lending.

Thanks to the introduction of relevant tools, financial institutions find it easier to issue stablecoins on Hedera. Currently, 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. The growth of stablecoins enhances Hedera's appeal in areas such as cross-border payments and settlements.

In the field of physical assets, Hedera has also seen some impressive cases emerge. A representative project is the real estate asset tokenization platform StegX, which tokenized over $100 million in real estate assets on Hedera in May. Meanwhile, the carbon credit platform DOVU has utilized Hedera for carbon asset on-chain, having tokenized approximately $1.1 billion in carbon credits in May.

In addition, the Hedera Foundation announced the launch of the "Hedera To Earn" (HTE) reward ecosystem in mid-July, unifying multiple large-scale applications into the same Web3 token economy. Users can earn HTE tokens by completing tasks, participating in content creation and virtual events, mining, and more, achieving cross-platform liquidity and incentives. This project aims to quickly catalyze on-chain activity and application innovation on Hedera, based on the existing large user base.

In summary, Hedera has attracted mainstream asset management institutions to pilot asset tokenization over the past year, relying on a 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 across multiple fields such as DeFi, stablecoins, tokenization of physical assets, and consumer applications. Numerous "hard power" elements have accumulated the actual demand for HBAR, providing 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 "enterprise-grade public chain" positioning and its continued influence on HBAR prices remains a key point of interest in the future.