Welcome to the Hedera Overview. In this edition, we explore Canary Capital’s HBAR ETF, network upgrades, and new Hedera Council members.
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The Ecosystem Insights
HBAR token price: $0.078 (-15.22%)
Market cap: $3.38B (-15.08%)
Total value locked (TVL): $46.7M (-21.1%)
Transactions per second: 5.81 tx/s (+28%)
The percentages and metrics are calculated from its change over a 30-day time frame, unless noted otherwise.
Hedera Highlights
#️⃣ What’s happening: On May 21, Canary Capital filed an updated prospectus for its Canary HBAR ETF, which it seeks to list on the Nasdaq. The update would permit the fund to stake the HBAR it holds to earn extra rewards. The fund aims to price its shares against the CoinDesk Hedera USD rate, and plans to use BitGo and Archax to custody the underlying tokens.
#️⃣ Why it matters: The ETF would give institutions and investors a regulated, familiar route to gain exposure to Hedera’s native token, HBAR, without having to buy, store or secure the token themselves.
The fund's structure now allows it to stake the tokens, which involves using them to secure the Hedera network in exchange for interest. For Hedera, a large amount of staked HBAR stands to improve the network’s participation metrics, and removes the staked tokens from circulation.
It’s worth noting that crypto holdings are not insured by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation-insured. The tokens’ custodian, BitGo, has a $250 million private insurance, but that amount is shared across all its clients and unlikely to cover the Trust's full position. Archax's custody service is not backed by an investor-protection scheme.
#️⃣ The bigger picture: Any potential demand for this ETF should be weighed against near-term supply trends. More than 3.97 billion HBAR tokens are scheduled to enter circulation this quarter, and will lift the network’s circulating supply to over 47.38 billion tokens. At face value, that much new float has a good chance of driving the token’s price down.
However, it’s important to consider where those tokens will go. The bulk of the unlock, the largest in the network’s history, is being earmarked for ecosystem funding, such as grants, staking rewards and operating expenses, and will not go to early investors or venture backers. And developers who receive tokens typically spend them gradually to support development and usage instead of liquidating them in one go.
Unpacking the hash
Hedera Council added new members as Strategic and Community partners:
The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative - a not-for-profit insurance and risk management consortium focused on standardizing how property risk data is verified across the insurance industry
EQTYLab - establishes cryptographic proof and runtime verification for AI workflows
Hgraph - provides APIs, AI-native intelligence, relay infrastructure, and MCP tooling for Hedera
Kabila App - creates applications (wallet, launchpad, market, and toolkit) for Hedera
Xeni travel - embeds travel solutions for large enterprises, superapps, and fintechs
The HIP-1313 proposal went live on mainnet as part of Hedera’s v0.73 network upgrade. The upgrade introduced an optional "high-volume" fast lane that lets organizations create large batches of accounts, tokens, or NFTs all at once without slowing down the rest of the network. It's built to address one-off surges, for example when a product onboards thousands of customers at launch, or migrates users ahead of a regulatory deadline. The fast lane would let projects set a ceiling on what the event will cost, so spending stays predictable.
Hedera's mainnet and testnet are now supported by Sourcify, the open-source verification service used across many Ethereum-compatible blockchains. The partnership helps developers confirm if a deployed smart contract matches its published source code using standard tools. The move also folds Hedera contracts into a shared cross-chain database of more than 100,000 verified contracts, making the network more accessible to the much larger pool of Ethereum developers.
Hedera released Agent Kit V4, a toolkit for building AI agents that can transact on the network. The main addition to the Agent Kit in this version is a policy and guardrails system that lets developers set rules for what agents can do, such as capping how much HBAR agents can spend, restricting payments to approved addresses, and logging every action. The release also adds support for Google's agent development framework, letting developers build AI agents using Google’s tools and Gemini models. Hedera said its payment scheme has been accepted by the x402 standard, enabling pay-per-request transactions to be settled in HBAR or stablecoins like USDC.
COFRA concluded its tenure on the Hedera Council on May 31 after three years.
Ecosystem players
OKCoinJapan has listed HBAR on its exchange, letting Japanese users trade the token. Japan operates one of the world's strictest crypto regulatory regimes, so the listing places HBAR among a limited group of assets cleared for the market.
The Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre have released the final report for Project Acacia, a research effort into how tokenized assets, digital money, and new settlement infrastructure can strengthen financial markets. As part of the project, Australian Payments Plus ran settlements, including tokenized asset transactions and wholesale CBDC workflows, on a hybrid setup that combined Hedera's public network with the private HashSphere network. The report showcases a working model for pairing public and private ledgers without sacrificing the regulatory controls and performance institutions require.
The Bank of England and the BIS Innovation Hub London Centre published findings from their joint DLT Innovation Challenge, which Hedera contributed to as part of broader industry work on the future of wholesale settlement. Hedera's input focused on settlement finality and how a network's consensus design shapes the speed, trust, and efficiency of settlement systems. The report noted the benefits of permissioned validators, efficient transaction propagation, and DAG-based architectures.
Hedera has concluded its Hello Future Apex Hackathon, the final installment of a three-part hackathon series. The competition awarded $250,000 across five tracks: AI & Agents; DeFi & Tokenization; Sustainability; Open Track; and Legacy Builders. The projects that won skewed towards real-world asset tokenization and AI agents with built-in safeguards: Ketch is a marketplace that tokenizes federal fishing-quota rights to replace opaque broker networks; and Coppice is an onchain green bond that fines issuers who miss their environmental targets.
Hashgraph was named a finalist for the Best Financial Services Infrastructure Solution prize in the Future of Finance Awards 2026, citing its work on HashSphere and CLPR.
HashPack, the leading Hedera wallet, now supports 15 languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Arabic-script Urdu. Users can switch the app’s language from the general settings menu.
SaucerSwap, the largest decentralized exchange on Hedera, ran a week-long, testnet bug bounty from May 25 to June 1 in order to stress-test its V3 order book ahead of its mainnet launch. The bounty offered rewards in SAUCE tokens worth up to $50,000 for critical vulnerabilities. The program targeted flaws that could affect user funds, order execution or market integrity.
SaucerSwap published V3 Launch Economics RFC, a governance framework for defining how the exchange's new order book operates. The new model would fund liquidity through maker rebates that are paid directly using trading fees rather than token emissions. It also adds xSAUCE staking discounts of up to 40%, and uses a portion of every fee stream to buy back and burn SAUCE to tighten supply over time.
Hedera sponsored Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam in late May, where its senior go-to-market and solutions staff showcased its work on stablecoins, tokenization, compliant payments, identity and AI-driven commerce.
Get involved with the community
Find the latest job postings at Hedera ecosystem projects
Until next time!
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This information is for entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research.