Hedera Hashgraph Surpasses 50 Billion Transactions with Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Hedera Hashgraph is a public distributed ledger that operates on a directed acyclic graph, rather than a traditional block-and-chain model. This allows for asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance without miners or energy-intensive proof of work.

The network's native token, HBAR, has a fixed supply of 50 billion tokens and is used to pay transaction fees, fund network staking, and secure the ledger through a weighted proof-of-stake mechanism. The governing council of 31 organizations, including Google, IBM, and Deutsche Telekom, operates consensus nodes and manages the network treasury.

Hedera has processed over 50 billion mainnet transactions since launch, with production throughput peaking above 3,300 transactions per second and three-to-five-second finality. The network's native services, including the Hedera Token Service and Consensus Service, support enterprise use cases from stablecoin issuance to supply-chain audit trails.

The consensus algorithm used by Hedera, called gossip-about-gossip and virtual voting, allows for aBFT without proof-of-work or leader election. However, this model requires more than two thirds of the stake-weighted voting power to remain honest, or it will fail outright.