On August 24, 2018, the Hedera mainnet came to life — a ledger governed not by anonymous miners but by a rotating council of some of the world's largest institutions. Eight years later the network is still here, still finalizing transactions in seconds for fractions of a cent, and still answering the same question it started with: what if enterprise governance and a fast consensus algorithm were combined from day one?
This week marks the eighth anniversary of that launch, so here is the story in eight chapters — one per year, roughly — ending with the live numbers you can check on our HBAR Pulse dashboard right now.
Hedera Hashgraph the company was founded in 2017 by Leemon Baird, inventor of the hashgraph consensus algorithm, and Mance Harmon. The mainnet that launched on August 24, 2018 was unusual from the start: instead of a proof-of-work chain, it ran hashgraph's asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT) — the highest formal security grade for consensus — across a council of governing members rather than open validators. Skeptics called the council model centralized. Eight years on, that same model is what institutions point to when they explain why they chose Hedera.
For its first year the network ran in restricted mode while the platform hardened. Open access arrived on September 13, 2019, when anyone could finally create an account and transact. The earliest public transactions are still on record via the Hedera Mirror Node API — the first ones carry a consensus timestamp of September 13, 2019 and fees of a fraction of a cent. That fee floor, roughly $0.0001 for a transfer and capped by design, has remained one of Hedera's signature promises.
In 2021 the Hedera Token Service (HTS) went live, letting projects mint native tokens at the protocol layer — no smart contract required — with built-in compliance controls like KYC and freeze keys. Native minting made Hedera instantly attractive to stablecoin and asset-tokenization pilots, a direction the network never really left.
The 2022 upgrades delivered Smart Contracts 2.0: full Ethereum Virtual Machine equivalence, meaning Solidity developers could deploy existing contracts with minimal changes and use familiar tooling. That single change unlocked the DeFi era on Hedera, because it lowered the porting cost for every team already building on Ethereum tooling.
HTS tokens with metadata became Hedera's NFT standard, and 2022 brought a burst of collections, marketplaces, and community energy. Like NFT cycles everywhere, the froth cooled — but the rails stayed, and today they power everything from collectibles to event tickets to tokenized real-world assets.
SaucerSwap, the network's homegrown DEX, matured from its V1 AMM to V2 concentrated liquidity and then a V3 central limit order book with limit orders and depth. By July 2026 the protocol reported $6 billion in all-time volume across more than 19 million trades (SaucerSwap docs). If you want to watch that flow live, our War Room and Swap Leaderboard visualize it continuously.
Hedera's quietest chapter may be its most important: regulated asset tokenization. abrdn, the UK's largest active asset manager, tokenized a money market fund on Hedera via the FCA-regulated exchange Archax — real fund shares, not a demo. The council itself — abrdn, Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Google, Dell and others over the years — turned from a talking point into a distribution channel for exactly this kind of work.
The most recent chapter is the one HBAR holders know best. The Canary HBAR ETF (ticker HBR) launched on Nasdaq on October 28, 2025 — the first US spot HBAR fund. In August 2026 Grayscale withdrew its own Hedera ETF filing (Form RW, August 7, on SEC EDGAR), which we cover in detail in Grayscale Hedera ETF Withdrawal Explained. One issuer in, one out — but the door to US-listed HBAR exposure is now open, and it did not exist at any prior anniversary.
Eight years in, the honest answer is: once, briefly, and it was not a consensus failure. On March 9, 2023, attackers abused a bug in the network's Smart Contract Service to try to move funds they did not own. Because the bug obscured the true state of the ledger, Hedera's team deliberately took the mainnet offline while they wrote and tested a patch — an option a permissioned council network has and a permissionless chain does not. The network was restored within days with the exploit contained, user balances intact, and a root-cause report published (hedera.com blog). Since then the mainnet has run continuously, which you can verify yourself: HBAR Pulse shows live transactions flowing right now, and the Mirror Node will happily serve you eight years of history, gaps included — there are none since 2023.
The episode also settled an argument. Critics called the 2023 pause proof of centralization; defenders called it proof that a governed network can actually respond to a live security incident instead of watching a hacker drain a bridge for a week. Both things can be true, and the trade-off is worth understanding before you build or invest.
Ask "is Hedera a blockchain?" and the technically correct answer is no — it is a hashgraph, a directed-acyclic-graph ledger where nodes gossip transactions to each other ("gossip about gossip") and reach consensus through virtual voting rather than global proof-of-work races or sequential blocks. Practically, that shows up as three differences you can feel:
Whether that is "more decentralized" than proof-of-stake chains with tens of thousands of anonymous validators is a fair, open debate. What is not open is the outcome after eight years: the network has settled every transaction ever submitted to it, at a fee its users could predict in advance.
The "Hedera is dead — it only does 3 TPS" take resurfaces every few months, and it deserves an honest answer, because the number itself is usually real. Measured against the Mirror Node during the writing of this article (August 29, 2026), mainnet processed 871 transactions in five minutes — about 2.9 per second, spread across HBAR transfers, consensus-service messages, EVM transactions and contract calls. So yes: around 3 TPS. The conclusion people draw from it is what falls apart.
Throughput measures demand, not capability. Hedera's network is built to handle on the order of 10,000 transactions per second; today's traffic uses well under one percent of that. On Ethereum, congestion is the point — users bid gas in a mempool auction, so a busy chain shows a huge TPS and an empty one shows a cheap TPS, and the number doubles as a health gauge. Hedera has no mempool auction: fees are fixed in dollars (about $0.0001 for a basic transfer), so nothing pushes usage toward capacity, and TPS simply tracks how much the world wants to transact right now. A highway at 3 a.m. is not a broken highway — it is a highway with lanes to spare, which is exactly what you want from settlement infrastructure you plan to build on.
The rest of the "dead chain" checklist reads worse for the critics the more of it you check:
None of this makes Hedera a busy network today — usage is genuinely modest, and pretending otherwise would be the same mistake in reverse. The accurate statement is narrower: "Hedera is alive, finalizing every transaction in seconds at its usual fractions of a cent, with vastly more capacity than demand."
For the full picture — TPS, fees, supply schedule, node stakes — HBAR Pulse updates in real time, and Wallet Lookup will show any account's own history, including staking rewards.
When did Hedera launch?
The Hedera mainnet went live on August 24, 2018. Open access — when anyone could transact — followed on September 13, 2019.
When was Hedera founded?
Hedera Hashgraph, the company, was founded in 2017 by Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon; the hashgraph consensus algorithm predates the company.
How old is Hedera?
As of August 2026, the mainnet is eight years old and open to the public for almost seven.
Has Hedera ever been hacked or gone down?
Once: in March 2023 an exploit in the Smart Contract Service led Hedera to briefly pause the mainnet while it patched the bug. The network was restored within days with user balances intact, and it has run continuously since.
Is Hedera a blockchain?
Strictly no — Hedera is a hashgraph: a directed-acyclic-graph ledger that reaches aBFT consensus through gossip and virtual voting instead of sequential blocks. It behaves like a blockchain for users (accounts, tokens, fees) but with seconds-level finality and no miners.
Is Hedera dead?
No — but usage is modest, and that is what the "3 TPS" posts are actually measuring. Live in August 2026: 29 council-run nodes operated by Google, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Nomura and other named institutions, 11.35 billion HBAR staked, and continuous second-level finality since the 2023 patch. Low TPS reflects unused capacity on a fixed-fee network, not a stopped one.
What has stayed the same for 8 years?
The fee floor (fractions of a cent, capped), 3–5 second finality, aBFT security, and the fixed 50 billion HBAR supply.
Eight years in, the network's pitch is remarkably close to 2018's: fast, fair, cheap, enterprise-governed. What changed is everything built on top. This article is historical context, not financial advice — nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell HBAR.