First published 20 April 2020. Expanded in October 2026 so the fee schedule and the account numbers match the network as it works now. Hedera is a public ledger whose computers agree by hashgraph rather than by Bitcoin-style mining. HBAR is the coin. You pay fees with it. The nodes that put transactions in order are run by a governing council of organisations, capped in the design at 39, not by whoever shows up with hardware.
That council is the fact people skip. A network can be public to use and still closed to run. Both sentences fit Hedera. This page is the machine, not a reason to hold the coin.
Where it came from
Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon, through a company called Swirlds, published the hashgraph paper in 2016 and formed Hedera to run a public network on it. Mainnet began on 24 August 2018. Fifty billion HBAR were created then. Nothing is mined, and the design does not add a fifty-billion-and-first coin by a later vote of hobbyists. Open access, meaning a person who was not in the early test could use it, came on 16 September 2019. The first council members were companies, announced in 2019. The council still decides software changes and the fee schedule.
How agreement works
Hashgraph is a gossip protocol. Nodes tell each other what they have heard, including who told them, and from that history they can vote without sending a separate ballot around. The project’s claim is that this orders transactions quickly and that the history does not fork into two valid chains. Speed is a property you can notice. It is not a promise that an application built on top is safe, and it is not the same thing as anyone being able to join the node set.
The council’s own description says it cannot freeze an HBAR transfer, reverse one, or stop you opening an account. It also says the council can delete a file or a smart contract hosted on the nodes, for content it considers illegal. Read those as two different powers. A coin transfer and a hosted file are not the same object. A council minute is not a helpdesk that will undo a payment you sent to the wrong account.
Fees and account numbers
Fees are written in US dollars and then converted into HBAR at a rate the network updates. You pay HBAR. The dollar price of the fee is the part the council sets, and it reviews that schedule. A tutorial that quotes a fee in HBAR is quoting a day, because the conversion moves. Standard transactions use the published schedule. Some high-volume operations use a rate that rises with demand. On-chain fees are an auction is the general idea on other chains. Here the ordinary transfer is closer to a price list.
A native account looks like 0.0.1234. That is not an Ethereum address, even though Hedera also speaks a form of the Ethereum virtual machine and an account can have a 0x alias. If the deposit page shows 0.0 and a long hex, use the one it told you to use. Some venues add a memo. Copy it when the screen shows one. The wrong network is still the wrong city.
HBAR is not Bitcoin, and a council is not a mining pool. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, stake, or move HBAR.
