Hedera
Hedera is a public distributed ledger network offering services such as token minting, consensus, and smart contracts, with a focus on sustainability and scalability.
Hedera Services
Hedera offers various services including the Hedera Token Service (HTS) for minting and configuring tokens, the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) for verifiable timestamps and event ordering, and support for Solidity smart contracts. The Hedera Dashboard allows for analyzing network activity, and the Fee Estimator helps estimate transaction costs. Additionally, Hedera provides scalable, real-time timestamped events through decentralized logs, and facilitates the development and deployment of decentralized identity management and DeFi applications.
Hedera Products
Key products offered by Hedera include the Hedera Stablecoin Studio, an all-in-one toolkit for stablecoin solutions, and the Hedera Guardian, which supports auditable carbon markets and traceability. Hedera also facilitates real-world asset tokenization and supports loyalty rewards programs. Developers can leverage the network's APIs for creating real-time web3 applications and ecosystems. The native staking feature allows stakers to earn rewards, and the Hedera Mirror Node software provides cost-effective querying of historical data from the public ledger.
Hedera Governing Council
Hedera's governing council consists of over 30 highly diversified organizations, including enterprises, web3 projects, and prestigious universities. Some council members include Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, Magazine Luiza, Nomura Holdings, Inc., Swisscom Blockchain, Dell Technologies, and COFRA Holding. The council sets the network's fee schedule and ensures responsible governance. The council also voted to purchase and open-source the intellectual property rights to the hashgraph consensus algorithm.
Hedera Ecosystem and Open-Source Contributions
Hedera supports an open-source ecosystem where developers can contribute through Hedera Improvement Proposals (HIPs). The codebase and ecosystem standards are open-source, encouraging community involvement in development. Additionally, Hedera provides grants and accelerators for projects, and has a Partner Program to explore partnerships. The network is designed to be collusion-resistant and governed responsibly by council members.
Hedera's Sustainability and Carbon Commitment
Hedera is committed to being a carbon-negative public network through the purchase of quarterly carbon credits. The efficiency of its hashgraph consensus makes it one of the most sustainable public networks, based on average energy consumed per transaction. Hedera's Guardian platform and its methodologies for digital measurement, reporting, and verification (dMRV) aim to develop standards for sustainability reporting, scale validation and verification, and explore potential for a global carbon price to incentivize climate action.