Welcome to the Hedera Overview, providing a suite of updates for Hedera enthusiasts, users, developers and curious-minded web3 users about all that’s happening in the ecosystem.
In this edition, we cover Lloyds Banking Group and Aberdeen's UK-first tokenized collateral FX trade on Hedera; our recent quarterly webinar with Hashgraph CIO Gregg Bell on institutional adoption; and Hedera’s expanding footprint across payments, developer tooling, and finance.
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The Ecosystem Insights
HBAR token price: $0.066 (-2.4%)
Market cap: $2.89B (-0.37%)
Total value locked (TVL): $21.1M (-13.5)
Transactions per second: 3.99 (+20.54%)
The percentages and metrics are calculated from its change over a 14-day time frame, unless noted otherwise.
Hedera Highlights
#️⃣ What's happening: Lloyds Banking Group, Aberdeen Investments, and Archax completed a pilot that used tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) as collateral for a foreign exchange transaction on Hedera.
Archax issued and held tokenized units of Aberdeen's money market fund and UK government bonds ("gilts"). Aberdeen and Lloyds then used these as collateral to back real FX trades between themselves. The transfer was run over Archax's "Nest" network.
#️⃣ Why it matters: The pilot was the UK’s first FX trade where a digital asset was used as collateral. Traditionally, many firms couldn’t use their money market fund holdings as collateral, and instead had to redeem or convert the holdings into cash or another eligible asset before posting it as collateral. This added settlement steps, and potentially slows down transactions.
Aberdeen's Head of Product, Allan Trimmer, pointed to Hedera's low energy use and governance model as deciding factors.
#️⃣ The bigger picture: The pilot was also mentioned in the HM Treasury’s Wholesale Digital Markets Champion report, which singled out the trade as the UK’s benchmark for tokenized collateral.
The report projected that tokenization could add up to £33 billion (about $44.6 billion) a year to the U.K. economy, and £14 billion (about $18.9 billion) in new tax revenue by 2035.
Our Latest Institutional Webinar on Hedera
Hashgraph has spent the past year building its settlement infrastructure for finance.
In our quarterly Token Relations webinar, Hashgraph’s Chief Investment Officer, Gregg Bell, discussed what differentiates the Hedera network for institutional users and where adoption stands heading into the second half of 2026. He noted a few core pillars across Hedera’s public network being validated by Fortune 500 companies; major institutions joining Hedera Council; and the recent Fidelity money market fund on Hedera as key points.
Bell also said HashSphere, the private, permissioned chain built with Hedera technology, is seeing institutional adoption. This will be strengthened by Cross Ledger Protocol (CLPR), which is currently in development by Hashgraph, and lets assets move between private and public environments without requiring bridges.
Looking ahead, Bell said institutional user acquisition is the metric to watch rather than headline RWA or transaction figures. He expects stablecoin-based commerce and onchain audit trails to see the most near-term movement.
Longer-term, he expects the underlying technology to fade into the background entirely, and compared it to how the internet became invisible infrastructure once the "dot-com" label stopped mattering.
To listen to the complete interview, please check out the recording here.
Ecosystem updates
DOVU, which builds digital infrastructure for carbon credits, announced a partnership with BCarbon, a carbon credit registry, to tokenize carbon credits on Hedera.
Hedera Foundation has committed a recovery facility to help make Bonzo Finance users whole following an oracle exploit in which an attacker drained approximately $9 million from the protocol. Advances covering the full value of affected positions will be paid to verified wallets through a dedicated program.
Taurus, a Swiss custody and infrastructure firm, completed its integration with Hedera, which was done in three phases over 18 months. Taurus now supports Hedera’s full tech stack, allowing its clients to use the network for custody, staking, issuing tokenized products, node infrastructure, and smart contracts.
Utila, a custody and wallet provider, is now available on Hedera. Utila serves alongside Hashgraph and HashSphere as an infrastructure provider for Project Acacia, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s digital asset pilot.
Kraken listed HBAR, expanding the token's reach to one of the largest crypto exchanges globally and broadening its trading availability.
Unpacking the hash
Hedera joined Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program, which currently has over 120 members. The program aims to build a collaborative framework for cross border payments, onchain settlement, and institutional blockchain adoption.
Hedera released a developer tool, scaffold-hbar, that allows developers to build apps using a single command. The tool, built in partnership with Buidler Labs, offers eight ready-made templates for common use cases, like connecting with other blockchains, pulling real-time data, and setting up recurring payments.
Hedera launched an x402 bounty in which developers competed by building agentic payments solutions using the agentic protocol on Hedera for a chance to win one of five $1,000 prizes.
Hedera participated in the ETHGlobal Lisbon Hackathon, offering $15,000 in prizes for teams building products for agentic payments, tokenization, or cross-chain automation.
Hedera expanded its EVM compatibility for the Smart Contract Service, which lets developers build with Solidity tools like Hardhat and Remix.
ioBuilders and Hedera announced that Asseto, a tokenization platform, now allows institutions to use Hedera mainnet and Hashsphere for issuance, lifecycle management, trading and settlement.
Check out the Token Relations Ecosystem Livestream with Eric Piscini, CEO of Hashgraph and Carlos Matilla Sanz, CEO of ioBuilders for more details.
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.