The diversified development of the Hedera ecosystem promotes HBAR market performance

Amid the overall volatility of the cryptocurrency market, Hedera's native token HBAR has shown strong upward momentum. Since its low point in 2024, the price of HBAR has increased by more than 6 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 has strong institutional support behind it. This round of increase mainly stems from the following aspects: traditional financial institutions utilizing the Hedera network for asset tokenization, continuous upgrades in network performance, and the ongoing enrichment of the DeFi and real-world asset (RWA) ecosystem. These factors together have brought actual demand and market recognition to HBAR.

Preference of Institutional Investors

Starting in the second half of 2024, the Hedera ecosystem attracted the attention of numerous institutional investors and traditional financial giants. In November 2024, the UK-regulated digital asset trading platform Archax launched money market fund tokens from several globally renowned asset management companies, all of which were issued on the Hedera mainnet. In February 2025, the Hedera Foundation announced an investment in the US dollar money fund tokens issued by a certain international asset management company through Archax, further strengthening Hedera's position in the institutional-grade asset tokenization space.

On-chain data shows that large investors maintain a consistently optimistic attitude towards HBAR. Since October 2024, the number of wallets holding between 1 million to 10 million HBAR has been steadily increasing, with wallets holding amounts in the tens of millions also showing a stable accumulation trend. This indicates that large funds are confident in the long-term prospects of HBAR, while also providing liquidity support to the market.

Technical Upgrades and Performance Improvements

To meet the growing application demands, the Hedera network enhances its performance and functionality through regular upgrades. In June and July 2025, Hedera completed the mainnet upgrades to versions v0.62 and v0.63, respectively. These upgrades primarily focused on system core and operational improvements, without altering the core economic model of HBAR.

Take the v0.63 upgrade in July as an example, the new version adds 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 network's resilience and throughput, providing technical support for large-scale commercial application deployment. At the same time, Hedera has also released corresponding tools and SDK updates to facilitate developers in deploying applications in a richer network environment.

It is worth mentioning that Hedera donated all protocol and server-side source code to the Linux Foundation project Hiero in September 2024, achieving full-chain open-source governance from consensus nodes to SDKs and service layers. This greatly enhances the project's transparency and community engagement.

Governance Structure Optimization and Ecological Support

In May 2025, the Hedera ecosystem underwent significant organizational restructuring and brand updates. The HBAR Foundation was renamed to the Hedera Foundation, and the Hedera Governing Council was renamed to the Hedera Council, with both entities operating independently under the new brand. This transformation aims to clarify the functions of all parties and unify the "Hedera" brand image.

The Hedera Governing Council consists 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 enjoy equal voting rights, term limits, and a transparent nomination process to prevent decision-making from being monopolized. This cross-industry and cross-regional governance model provides a solid guarantee for the security, stability, and compliance of the Hedera network.

The new CEO of the Hedera Foundation stated that the focus will be on promoting DeFi and community innovation, as well as continuing to support institutional adoption and tokenization development. The foundation plans to launch more ecosystem integration projects and DeFi tools in 2025 to help developers and users manage digital assets more easily. Meanwhile, the Hedera Council will continue to focus on network security and compliance governance to ensure the robustness and decentralization of the network.

DeFi Ecosystem and Expansion of Real-World Application Scenarios

The DeFi and application scenarios of the Hedera ecosystem have shown significant expansion in recent years. According to a report by DappRadar, the transaction volume on the Hedera chain reached approximately $4.66 billion by December 2024, marking that the ecological liquidity has entered the billion-dollar level.

The main decentralized exchange on the Hedera chain, SaucerSwap, has recently surpassed a trading volume of over $284 million in the past 30 days. In addition, there are various DeFi tools and services in the Hedera ecosystem, such as Pangolin and HederaSwap, providing users with functions like exchange and lending. In May of this year, the Hedera Foundation and community launched the developer tool "Hedera Contract Builder" to simplify the smart contract creation process and support batch transactions, reducing the development threshold.

In the field of stablecoins and real-world assets (RWA), Hedera has also made significant progress. 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 around $212.5 million. Projects such as the real estate asset tokenization platform StegX and the carbon credit platform DOVU have also achieved large-scale asset onboarding on Hedera.

In addition, the Hedera Foundation recently announced the launch of "Hedera To Earn"(HTE) reward ecosystem, integrating three major applications into the same Web3 token economy, aimed at quickly enhancing the activity and application innovation on the Hedera chain.

In summary, Hedera has made efforts in multiple areas to attract mainstream financial institutions, continuously upgrade technology, optimize governance structure, and expand DeFi and real application scenarios, thereby accumulating actual demand for HBAR and gaining market recognition. As more institutions and applications are realized and on-chain activity further increases, whether Hedera can consolidate its "enterprise-grade public chain" positioning and the continuous impact on HBAR prices will be a focus of attention in the future.