The diverse development of the Hedera ecosystem boosts HBAR market performance

Amidst the fluctuations in the cryptocurrency market, the native token of the Hedera network, HBAR, has shown an upward trend against the tide. Since its low point in 2024, the price of HBAR has increased more than sixfold, 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 total market capitalization of approximately $13.5 billion.

Despite being relatively low-key in the crypto community, HBAR has strong institutional support behind it. This surge is driven by several fundamental factors, including traditional financial institutions using the Hedera network for asset tokenization, multiple critical upgrades to the network enhancing performance and scalability, and the continuously enriching DeFi and real-world asset(RWA) ecosystem creating actual demand for HBAR.

Favor of Mainstream 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 launched currency market fund tokens issued by three globally renowned asset management companies. These tokens have been launched on the Hedera Hashgraph mainnet, allowing institutional investors to directly trade traditional fixed-income products on Hedera's high-throughput network.

In February 2025, the Hedera Foundation announced an investment in a certain international asset management company's dollar currency fund tokens, further strengthening Hedera's position in the institutional-grade asset tokenization field.

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 are largely created by third parties and have not yet received official confirmation or coverage from mainstream media. The industry generally believes that these "new tokens" may be market speculation about potential products.

On-chain data shows that large holders continue to be bullish on HBAR. According to analysis institutions, since October 2024, the number of wallets holding large amounts of HBAR has been continuously increasing, indicating that large investors remain confident in the long-term prospects of HBAR.

Technical Iteration and Protocol Upgrade

To meet the growing application demands, the Hedera network continues to upgrade to enhance performance and functionality. For example, in June and July 2025, Hedera completed the v0.62 and v0.63 mainnet upgrades, respectively. These upgrades focus on system core and operational improvements without changing the core economic model of HBAR.

The v0.63 version released in July introduced enterprise-level features, such as support for non-zero shard IDs and domain IDs, the addition of a fee configuration throttling mechanism, and optimization of the MerkleDB storage system. These improvements are aimed at enhancing the resilience and throughput of the network, providing technical support for large-scale commercial deployments. At the same time, Hedera 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, significantly enhancing the project's transparency and community participation.

Overall, Hedera's technological iteration follows a roadmap of "rapid iteration and continuous optimization." Each upgrade has improved the network's capacity and enhanced the features available to developers. These stable and gradual technological advancements provide the underlying support for ecological applications and value transformation, creating the necessary conditions for 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 renamed the Hedera Foundation, and the Hedera Management Council was renamed the Hedera Council, both operating independently under the new brand. This transformation aims to allow 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, aerospace, telecommunications, and finance, ensuring diversity and balance in network governance. Council members enjoy equal voting rights, term limits, and an open nomination process to ensure decentralized 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. At the same time, the Hedera Council will continue to focus on network security and compliance governance, ensuring the robustness and decentralization of the network.

This governance reform helps better support ecological development. The foundation provides funding and resources to developers by segmenting specialized funds in different fields. Meanwhile, the council brings together leading global institutions to continuously upgrade the network and formulate policies. The clear division of labor and collaboration between the foundation and the council strengthens the cohesion of the Hedera community and clarifies the direction of its development.

The Growth 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 billion-dollar 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 last 7 days. Additionally, there are various DeFi tools and services in the Hedera ecosystem that offer functionalities such as swapping and lending for users.

Stablecoins and RWA applications are important aspects of the expansion of the Hedera ecosystem. 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, primarily in USDC.

In the field of physical assets, a real estate asset tokenization platform has tokenized over $100 million of real estate assets on Hedera. At the same time, a carbon credit platform has also utilized Hedera for on-chain carbon assets, tokenizing carbon credits valued at approximately $1.1 billion.

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

In summary, Hedera has attracted mainstream asset management institutions to pilot asset tokenization in the past year by relying on a high-throughput network and transparent governance; through a series of protocol upgrades and open-source initiatives, it has continuously improved network performance and developer experience; and it has formed a complementary and progressive ecological pattern in multiple 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.

In the future, with more financial institutions and consumer-level applications being implemented, as well as further verification of on-chain activity and user retention data, whether Hedera can consolidate its position as an "enterprise-grade public chain" and its continued impact on the HBAR price remains a key point worth paying attention to.