HEDERA · HBAR
A US$11 million April investment across Valour's Hedera ETP suite points to growing institutional demand for regulated HBAR exposure alongside Hedera's tokenization, payments, and public-sector activity.
DeFi Technologies Inc.· @DeFiTechGlobal↗
A financial technology company bridging traditional capital markets and decentralised finance through multiple business lines including Asset Management, DeFi Alpha, Stillman Digital, DeFi Ventures, and Reflexivity Research, providing investors with streamlined access to industry-leading decentralised technologies and digital assets.
Valour Inc. & Valour Digital Securities Limited· @ValourFunds↗
Wholly-owned DeFi Technologies subsidiaries and leading issuers of digital asset ETPs, enabling retail and institutional investors to access crypto through their existing brokerage accounts. With 100+ products listed on Euronext, Xetra, Börse Frankfurt, London Stock Exchange, Nordic exchanges, and Brazil's B3 Exchange, Valour eliminates the complexity of direct digital asset ownership.
The April HBAR allocation sits across three Valour Hedera products: Valour Hedera (HBAR) on Börse Frankfurt, Valour Hedera SEK on Sweden's Spotlight Stock Market, and 1Valour Hedera Physical Staking on Euronext Amsterdam. With that context set, the rest of this report covers Hedera's architecture, the institutions on its council, current tokenization and public-sector activity, the 2026 roadmap, and current market and on-chain state.
Hedera runs on hashgraph, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) consensus mechanism with asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance. The public mainnet has been live since 2019. The network charges fixed USD-denominated fees starting at $0.0001 per transaction, converted to HBAR at the time of settlement. A typical token mint and transfer on Hedera costs roughly $0.0008. Hedera's native services are built for throughput: the Token Service and Consensus Service each have a theoretical maximum throughput of 10,000 transactions per second with finality in 3 to 5 seconds, while the EVM-compatible Smart Contract Service runs lower by design.
Application surface sits across four native services: the Hedera Token Service (HTS) for tokenization and stablecoins, the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) for tamper-evident event logs, the Smart Contract Service for EVM-compatible programmability, and the File Service for on-network file storage. Each is a first-class network primitive rather than a wrapped contract.
Governance is public-permissioned. The Hedera Council can hold up to 39 members per its LLC Agreement; today the roster sits at 35. Members serve up to two consecutive three-year terms, each member has one vote on a per-capita basis, and meetings are quarterly. A five-person Board of Directors operates above the Council: four directors are elected by Council, the fifth is the Hedera Council President serving ex officio. Mance Harmon was elected Chair in June 2025 for a two-year term beginning July 1, 2025.
On April 22, 2026, Valour announced a US$11 million institutional investment across its Hedera ETP suite: $10 million via Börse Frankfurt into Valour Hedera (HBAR), and $1 million via Sweden's Spotlight Stock Market into Valour Hedera SEK.
Across Valour's three Hedera products, aggregate HBAR AUM rose from approximately $7.54 million on April 15 to $17.27 million on April 22, an increase of about 129%. Because the April investment was allocated across more than one listing, aggregate suite AUM gives the fuller picture than a single exchange line. The largest increase came through the Frankfurt product on April 16, while the Spotlight SEK product also rose during the same weekly window.
By product, April 22 AUM stood at approximately $10.24 million for the Frankfurt EUR ETP, $4.87 million for the Spotlight SEK ETP, and $2.16 million for the Euronext Amsterdam physical staking note. The aggregate of those three lines is the figure that flows into the DEFT Valour Investment Opportunity Index (DVIO), DeFi Technologies' institutional benchmark, which weights HBAR exposure off asset-level AUM and net flow across Valour's regulated ETPs.
| Product | ISIN | Exchange | Fee | AUM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Valour Hedera (HBAR) | CH1213604528 | Börse Frankfurt (EUR) | 2.5% | $10.24M |
| Valour Hedera SEK | CH1213604585 | Spotlight Stock Market (SEK) | 2.5% | $4.87M |
| 1Valour Hedera Physical Staking | GB00BRC6JM96 | Euronext Amsterdam (EUR) | 2.5% | $2.16M |
"The strength of our ETP platform is not only in providing regulated access to digital assets, but in helping surface where institutional demand is forming."
Launched by DeFi Technologies on February 9, 2026, the DVIO Index is an institutional benchmark of the top fifty crypto assets held inside Valour's ETP ecosystem, with weights rebalanced weekly off actual regulated investor capital and net flow momentum. At inception, Valour's three Hedera products held roughly $7.19 million in aggregate AUM; by April 22, after the April investments, that figure had risen to about $17.27 million, roughly 2.4x the launch-level base.
That growth registered directly in the index's weekly data: for the week of April 15-21, Hedera ranked #1 in Valour's category inflows table.
Valour's Hedera ETPs are listed in Hedera's ecosystem directory, providing regulated, exchange-traded, audited access to HBAR exposure. That demand signal is best read alongside the network-side evidence: council activity, tokenization programs, the 2026 roadmap, and current on-chain conditions.
Three institutions have joined the Hedera Council in the first four months of 2026, in three different sectors. FedEx joined on February 13 with a stated focus on cross-border supply-chain verification. McLaren Racing joined on March 25 with a fan-engagement and digital-collectibles agenda tied to its Formula 1 and IndyCar programs. Accenture joined on April 30 with an explicit mandate around trust-based solutions for financial services, government agencies, and agentic AI in regulated environments.
"The digital transformation of global supply chains is inevitable... Hedera provides a neutral, enterprise-grade trust layer that enables verification at global scale, while allowing organizations like FedEx to continue building differentiated capabilities on top."
The full 35-member roster spans finance, enterprise technology, industrials, telecommunications, logistics, law, and capital markets, mapping onto Hedera's most visible use cases on the network today.
In July 2025, Lloyds Banking Group, Aberdeen Investments, and Archax completed what was reported as the UK's first foreign exchange trade collateralized by tokenized real-world assets. The collateral package was tokenized units of an Aberdeen money market fund and tokenized UK gilts; Archax issued, transferred, and held the tokens; Hedera carried the settlement.
"What separates Hedera is that it stands for many core values that align with ours, such as transparency, strong corporate governance, and sustainability."
The Lloyds trade is part of a wider Archax program on Hedera. Archax reports six onboarded asset managers and financial institutions, more than 100 tokenized assets, and over $300 million in value tokenized on Hedera. Other named programs include Aberdeen's £15 billion LUX Sterling money market fund tokenized via Archax's Tokenisation Engine, RedSwan tokenizing $2.2 billion of commercial real estate, StegX tokenizing over $100 million of institutional real estate, and Swarm distributing tokenized AAPL, TSLA, and gold.
Hedera has been selected for several public-sector pilots. Wyoming chose Hedera for its Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), the first state-issued stable token in the United States, currently on testnet. The Reserve Bank of Australia leads Project Acacia for wholesale CBDC exploration on Hedera; this work runs on HashSphere, the private-network counterpart that offers Hedera's Token, Consensus, Smart Contract, Asset Tokenization Studio, and Stablecoin Studio services in a permissioned environment. The Bank of England and the BIS Innovation Hub selected Hedera as one of two layer-1 networks for money and real-time gross settlement research. Qatar Financial Centre ran a digital receipt proof of concept on Hedera. Georgia's Ministry of Justice is exploring migration of its national real estate registry. The Australian Digital Dollar (AUDD) launched on Hedera through Stablecoin Studio.
HederaCon 2026 was held in Miami Beach on May 4, 2026. The agenda framed Hedera around production adoption: tokenization, interoperability, AI plus Web3, sustainable finance, stablecoins, compliance, and public policy. In that context, the 2026 roadmap groups into three public themes: regulated-market infrastructure, public-network protocol upgrades, and AI tooling with transaction controls.
Hashgraph used the event to announce three initiatives for regulated markets. CLPR, a bridgeless Cross-Ledger Protocol, entered closed beta for moving tokens, data, and messages across ledgers using cryptographic state proofs and threshold signatures. HashSphere, a private permissioned network powered by Hedera technology, became generally available for regulated markets. Hashgraph also announced an investment in ioBuilders, with HashSphere integration into the Asseto tokenization platform scheduled to begin in June 2026.
Release v0.73 updated Hedera mainnet on May 20, 2026. It enabled HIP-1261 Simple Fees, a unified base-plus-extras fee model calculated from a single JSON schedule, and HIP-1313 High-Volume Entity Creation, an optional burst lane for entity creation with separate throttle buckets and transparent utilization-based pricing. Hooks (HIP-1195) remain a development-track feature: the April 23 blog states that Hooks are available in the Hiero codebase for experimentation and are not yet on the Hedera public network.
Hedera's AI tooling fits the same infrastructure theme. Hedera launched AI Studio on May 14, 2025 as an open-source toolkit for AI-enabled applications anchored to HCS and HTS. On March 26, 2026, it launched Agent Lab inside the Hedera Developer Portal for building and testing agents. On May 18, 2026, Hedera Agent Kit V4 added modular packages, explicit plugins, policy and hook controls, MCP support, and Google ADK support. The common thread is controlled agent execution, verifiable records, and predictable fees.
"Data without trust is just noise. Reliable AI begins with verifiable data. By grounding AI in events that are immutably time-stamped on Hedera's Consensus and Token Services, builders can have confidence."
The next few quarters should show whether HederaCon announcements become production deployments, whether Hiero experimentation moves into public-network features, and whether mainnet protocol upgrades translate into measurable usage. Three markers define the roadmap test.
As of May 20, 2026, HBAR is trading at $0.0890 with a market capitalization of $3.86 billion and a fully diluted market cap of $4.45 billion. 43.37 billion tokens are in circulation against a max supply of 50 billion. CoinMarketCap places HBAR at rank #27. Trailing performance is roughly flat over 30 days and down about 9% over 90 days.
Hedera DeFi total value locked sits at $58.82M per DefiLlama. The series peaked at $213.96M on January 18, 2025, reached a 1-year low of $38.97M on February 16, 2026, and has held in the $58M to $65M band since.
Top dApps ranked by Hedera-only TVL show liquid staking dominating the chain. The DefiLlama chain TVL figure above excludes liquid staking by convention; Stader's Hedera-only TVL is shown here for completeness alongside the native protocols.
USD-pegged stablecoin supply on Hedera is $44.52M; the Hedera Stablecoin Studio customer roster includes USDC, AUDD, FRNT (Wyoming), PHPX (Philippine peso multi-bank), XSGD (Singapore dollar), Shinhan Bank, Standard Bank, and Brale.
In derivatives, CoinGlass shows Binance HBAR/USDT carrying $30.3M of open interest with $18.5M of 24-hour volume; Bybit shows $19.9M open interest. Funding rates are marginally positive across major perpetual venues (Binance and Bybit both under +0.01%), a mild long-side tilt.
On the equities side, a US-listed spot HBAR ETF began trading on Nasdaq on October 28, 2025.
Three regulated Hedera ETPs, listed in Frankfurt, Stockholm, and Amsterdam.
