Hello, r/cryptocurrency!

We’re a group of contributors to the Hedera project ($HBAR | #33 on CMC): A fast, carbon-negative, open source, public network built on hashgraph consensus — the network offers Solidity-based smart contracts to power decentralized applications. Hedera is also a fully decentralized governing council of global organizations consisting of web3 projects, enterprises, and universities.

And some of us are employees of the HBAR Foundation: a $5B grant-giving organization with Crypto Economy (DeFi), Metaverse, Sustainability, and FinTech funds to grow and empower the Hedera ecosystem.

A lot has changed since the launch of the Hedera mainnet on August 24th, 2018 — we’re excited to get everyone up-to-speed, help answer your questions, provide updates on the latest milestones (such as staking and community nodes) at both organizations, and share our vision for the future.

We want to give a big thanks to the r/cryptocurrency moderators for hosting us today. We’ll be answering questions from two handles: u/Hedera and u/Hbar_Foundation, and signing each answer with the responder’s name from the list below.

HBAR Foundation

• Don Thibeau | Chief Strategy Officer (Twitter)
• Elaine Song | Director, Ecosystem (Twitter)
• Wes Geisenberger | Sustainability Fund (Twitter)
• Alex Russman | Metaverse Fund (Twitter)

Hedera

• Christian Hasker | Head of Marketing (Twitter)
• Zenobia Godschalk | Head of Communications (Twitter)
• Ed Marquez | Developer Evangelist & Community Lead (Twitter)
• Sergey Metelin | Director, Developer Advocacy (Twitter)
• Brady Gentile | Director, Startup Ecosystem (Twitter)
• Gehrig Kunz | Director, Developer Relations (Twitter)

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We’ll be answering questions on April 11th, 2022 from 12:30pm - 3:30pm ET

To celebrate the r/cryptocurrency community, we will be giving away Hedera t-shirts to 50 participants. After participating in our AMA by asking a question, please fill out this form to be entered to win.

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About the HBAR Foundation

Founded in 2021, the HBAR Foundation fuels the development of the Hedera ecosystem by providing grants and other resources to developers, startups, and organizations that seek to launch decentralized applications in DeFi, NFTs, CBDCs, ESGs, gaming, and other sectors.

In addition to providing funding through a streamlined grant process, the HBAR Foundation acts as an integrated force multiplier through expert support across technical, marketing, business development, and other operational functions that are required to scale.

We have 3 primary goals: To grow awareness of, accelerate access to, and increase commerce within the HBAR economy. To that end, we measure our success via total value locked (TVL) as the aggregate value of the Hedera network.

Apply for funding for your project at https://www.hbarfoundation.org/apply

Primary Funds

• Crypto Economy | $150m | Incentivizing development and integration of crypto native tools, apps, and markets on Hedera supporting DeFi and more.
• Metaverse | $250m | Supporting projects which engage consumers through tokenized gaming, music, sports, collectibles, and loyalty points assets.
• FinTech | $50m | Funding projects which improve efficient value exchange with tokenized financial assets, stablecoins, and CBDCs.
• Sustainability | $100m | Empowering energy producers and consumers to form new decentralized markets for sustainability assets and sustainability initiatives.

Social

• Twitter, Telegram, Subreddit, LinkedIn

About Hedera

Hedera is a fast, carbon-negative, open-source, public network with Solidity-based smart contracts to power decentralized applications and a fully decentralized governing council of global organizations spanning across web3 projects, enterprises, and universities.

The core contributors of Hedera are focused on building functionalities, services, and developer tooling to support the same types of applications being funded by the HBAR Foundation.

One of the most exciting things about building on Hedera right now is that the DeFi ecosystem is just getting started with the re-introduction of optimized Smart Contracts — there are 750k+ account holders looking to use $HBAR and builders of NFT and DeFi applications will be the first ones to give them this opportunity. We’ve already seen significant organic growth in NFT marketplaces, browser wallet support, and related projects.

Hedera Apps

Hedera is home to hundreds of projects in the web3 space — here’s a tweet thread outlining a few of those larger applications. Additionally, full case studies can be found here.

As HBAR Foundation ecosystem grants ramp up, we’ll begin to see massive development of retail-focused applications coming to Hedera, such as these ones available today:

• NFT marketplaces like Zuse, HashAxis, and Turtlemoon.
• Wallets with transaction signing like HashPack and Venly
• Network bridges like HashPort
• Staking delegation apps like StaderLabs

All of which have been built organically by the Hedera developer community.

Smart Contract Hackathon | Now - May 16th | $500k+ in prizes

Hedera is hosting a Solidity smart contract hackathon through May 16th with over $500k in prizes to be earned for building DeFi, DAO, NFT, and Payment focused applications.

Upcoming Milestones

The product and ecosystem roadmap for Hedera can be found at https://hedera.com/roadmap.

A few things we’re especially excited about:

• Community-run network nodes
• Staking of HBAR on Hedera (HIP-406)
• Developer tooling (web3.js and ethers.js support)

Social

• Twitter, Discord (Developers Only), Subreddit

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Myths to Dispel

• Myth #1: Hashgraph consensus and Hedera’s services are proprietary
  • Hedera’s network services, officially supported SDKs, and every developer tool is open source under an Apache 2.0 license. Hashgraph consensus will be open source this year under an Apache 2.0 license. You can find the Hedera project’s GitHub here: https://github.com/hashgraph/
• Myth #2: Developers building dapps on Hedera can’t contribute to the project
  • Hedera Improvement Proposals (HIPs) include core protocol changes, as well as changes to the applications, frameworks, and protocols built on top of the Hedera public network and used by the community.The goal of HIPs is to have a place for everyone to propose new features, collect community thoughts and input on a particular issue, document all subject matters in one place, and provide a status on their implementation. You can view all of the HIPs and contribute here: https://hips.hedera.com/all.html
• Myth #3: Hedera is a private, permissioned network for Enterprises
  • The Hedera network is a public network infrastructure for everyone to anonymously create accounts and build decentralized applications on, without telling anyone who they are or performing KYC/AML.
  • The Hedera network today is operated by members of the governing council — each of the 26 members independently operates and maintains an individual node in their own data center or public cloud, ensuring full decentralization of consensus. This year, Hedera is allowing for community nodes — any member of the Hedera community can independently operate a node and earn $HBAR. And in the future, the entire network will be permissionless. Read the “path to permissionless” whitepaper here.
• Myth #4: Hedera doesn't have performant smart contracts
  • Hedera’s smart contracts 2.0 is an implementation of the Besu EVM (Solidity) that has been optimized for the Hedera network and hashgraph consensus. Solidity-based smart contracts on Hedera off the following benefits:
    • No congestion fees for gas / all txn fees are fixed (www.hedera.com/fees)
    • 15 million gas / second
    • 300+ txns / second
    • Integration with the native Token Service on Hedera mapped to ERC-20, 721, 1155 standards, 10k txns per second, and $0.0001 txn fees.

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Getting started with Hedera: A guide for devs and degens

Developer Quickstart

The easiest way as a developer to get started building on Hedera is by checking out the official Hedera documentation at https://docs.hedera.com/ and getting a testnet account from https://portal.hedera.com — we have officially-supported SDKs available in Java, Javascript, and Go.

• Set up your environment
• Try examples, tutorials, and demo applications
• Join the developer community on Discord
• Explore transaction history (Dragon Glass)

Degen Quickstart

As a self-proclaimed degenerate holding $HBAR, you have opportunities to use that $HBAR for things like staking, minting, buying, and selling NFTs, and participating in DeFi applications.

1. Install the HashPack browser wallet extension on Chrome: https://www.hashpack.app/post/how-to-create-your-first-account-with-hashpack
2. Check out the various applications on Hedera of which you can connect to via HashPack: NFT marketplaces (over 400+ NFT projects and over $4M USD in aggregate transactions) like Zuse, HashAxis, and Turtlemoon, network bridges to and from Ethereum and Polygon via HashPort, and staking delegation apps like StaderLabs.

Edit on the title: The funding allocated to the HBAR Foundation consisted of 5 billion hbars (approximately 10% of total supply), currently worth US $1 billion as of September 16th, 2021.