Hedera is a public distributed ledger whose native token is HBAR. It does the kind of work people expect from a layer-1 network, recording transactions and running applications, but it does not use a traditional blockchain to get there. Instead of stringing transactions into a chain of blocks, Hedera uses a structure called a hashgraph to agree on what happened and in what order.
The hashgraph method was invented by Leemon Baird, a computer scientist who co-founded the company Swirlds and holds the original patents on the design. He built Hedera with his business partner Mance Harmon. The network's mainnet launched in 2019. At the core is a "gossip about gossip" protocol: each node shares what it knows with others, and those messages also carry a record of who told whom, which lets every node reconstruct the same time-ordered history without a central referee. The result is described as an asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus, a class of design meant to keep agreeing on the truth even when some participants fail or act dishonestly and messages arrive out of order. Hedera frames its approach as a variant of proof of stake, where HBAR backs the security of the network.
Governance is the part that sets Hedera apart from most public networks. Rather than relying on an open, anonymous set of operators, the mainnet is run by the Hedera Governing Council, a group of established organizations. Members have included companies such as Deutsche Telekom, IBM, FIS Global, and Tata Communications. The council oversees the software and the treasury and sets the direction of the network, with seats spread across different industries and regions so that no single member is in charge. That model trades some of the open-ended permissionless feel of other chains for a structure that large institutions tend to find easier to trust.
HBAR is the token that powers all of this. It pays the fees for using the network and is staked to help secure it, in keeping with the proof-of-stake framing the project uses. The pitch for Hedera leans on speed and a known, council-backed governance structure, aimed at businesses and developers who want a public ledger without the volatility of an open validator set. As with any network, the token's market value is set day to day by buyers and sellers and is separate from the technical claims about how the ledger runs.