What is Hedera Hashgraph and how does HBAR work?

Summary Hedera Hashgraph is a public distributed ledger that replaces the block-and-chain model with a directed acyclic graph, reaching asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance without miners or energy-intensive proof of work. The native token HBAR pays for transaction fees, funds network staking, and secures the ledger through a weighted proof-of-stake mechanism capped at 50 billion fixed supply. A governing council of 31 organizations, including Google, IBM, Dell, Boeing, and Deutsche Telekom, operates consensus nodes and manages the network treasury. Hedera has processed more than 50 billion mainnet transactions since launch, with production throughput peaking above 3,300 transactions per second and three-to-five-second finality. Three native services, the Hedera Token Service, Hedera Consensus Service, and an EVM-compatible smart contract layer, support enterprise use cases from stablecoin issuance to supply-chain audit trails. The first thing most newcomers hear about Hedera is that it is “just another blockchain.” That framing misses the central design choice. Hedera does not organize data into sequential blocks chained together by cryptographic hashes the way Bitcoin and Ether...