Hedera is a public distributed ledger network that uses a unique hashgraph consensus mechanism, not traditional blockchain technology. It is governed by a council of global organizations to ensure stability and decentralized control for enterprise-grade applications.
The network is designed for high-speed, low-fee transactions and is used for developing decentralized applications, tokenizing assets, and verifying data integrity. Its structure aims to provide fair ordering, asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance, and a 10,000+ transaction per second throughput.
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Hedera uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure called hashgraph, which is theoretically faster and more energy-efficient than traditional proof-of-work blockchains. It achieves consensus through virtual voting and gossip-about-gossip protocols.
Its hashgraph consensus algorithm allows transactions to be processed in parallel and confirmed in seconds with finality, while providing strong security guarantees against network attacks through established mathematical proofs.
HBAR is the native cryptocurrency of the Hedera network. It is used to pay for transaction fees, deploy smart contracts, and secure the network through staking to governing council members.