Hedera (HBAR) sustainability report

Hedera is present on the following networks: Hedera Hbar.

Hedera does not assemble transactions into a chain of blocks proposed by a leader. Its nodes instead build a shared directed acyclic graph of communication events. Whenever two nodes speak, the initiating node passes on everything it knows that the other does not, and each event it creates records the two prior events it builds upon, namely its own most recent one and the one it has just received. Because every event carries that ancestry, the graph is itself a verifiable record of who learned what and when, and it propagates across the network exponentially without any node needing to broadcast to all the others.

Ordering is then derived from the graph rather than negotiated through voting messages. Since each node holds the same ancestry information, each can compute what every other node would have voted at each stage of the protocol and arrive independently at the same answer. This virtual voting removes an entire round of network traffic, and it produces both an agreed order and an agreed timestamp for every transaction, the timestamp being derived from when the participating nodes first received it rather than chosen by whoever proposed a block. Once settled, the order is settled permanently: the protocol offers asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance, meaning it stays safe without assuming any bound on message delivery times, provided less than a third of the voting weight is dishonest. Finality arrives within seconds, with no probabilistic confirmation window and no fork to resolve.

Voting weight is proportional to the quantity of the network's native asset staked to each node, but the right to operate a consensus node is not open. The set is permissioned, and the address book of consensus nodes is maintained by the council of organizations that governs the network, whose members operate those nodes and vote on protocol and treasury decisions. The published roadmap moves through a stage of permissioned third-party operators toward eventual open participation, and that transition remains incomplete: consensus node operation is still restricted to approved operators, while the mirror nodes that answer historical queries are already open to anyone who wishes to run one.

Hedera is present on the following networks: Hedera Hbar.

Costs on Hedera are quoted in United States dollars and settled in the network's native asset. Each operation type carries a price in a fee schedule the network publishes, and when a transaction is handled the nodes convert that dollar price into a quantity of the native asset at an exchange rate they agree on. The practical effect is that the cost of an operation holds roughly constant in purchasing-power terms while the quantity of the asset charged moves inversely to its market rate, which is the property enterprise users were intended to be able to budget against. Pricing is per operation rather than metered through a gas auction, so there is no bidding contest for inclusion; a recent revision simplified how the components of a price are computed without altering the dollar denomination or the conversion step. Reading data back out of the network through the archival query nodes carries no charge at all.

A charge splits by purpose. One portion compensates the network as a whole for reaching consensus on the transaction, one goes to the particular node that accepted and submitted it, and one covers the specific service invoked, whether that is persisting a file, executing contract bytecode, creating an account or a token, or submitting a message to a topic. Collected charges accumulate in network accounts, part of which funds the pool from which node payments are made.

Consensus node operators receive a daily payment when they have genuinely taken part in consensus over the period, measured by their contribution to the rounds the protocol produces rather than by how many transactions they happened to route. An operator whose node was inactive receives nothing for that day, and an operator may also decline the payment outright. Holders of the native asset may stake to a node, which raises that node's voting weight and earns them a share of a reward pool whose maximum rate is a governance-set parameter. Staking of this kind does not lock the asset, which stays transferable throughout, and the protocol does not confiscate staked balances: the consequence for a node that fails to participate is forfeiture of its reward, not loss of a bond.

Hedera is present on the following networks: Hedera Hbar.

The energy figure for Hedera is built up from the machines that run the network rather than read from a meter. The method establishes how many nodes are operating, infers what hardware sits behind each of them, attaches a measured power draw to that hardware and aggregates across the node set for the reporting period. Nothing in this network's design ties electricity expenditure to reward, so the profitability reasoning used to model proof-of-work mining fleets has no counterpart here and is not applied.

The node count is unusually well constrained. Consensus node operation is permissioned and the roster of operators forms part of the network's own published address book, so the population performing consensus can be enumerated directly rather than approximated from crawler observations of an open peer-to-peer network. That removes the single largest source of error in this family of estimates. What remains uncertain is the configuration behind each entry: operators publish little about their individual deployments, and one address book entry may in practice be a redundant cluster rather than a single machine. The hardware assumption is therefore taken from the specification the node software is documented to require, covering processor class, memory, storage and network capacity, and per-device consumption comes from laboratory measurement of comparable equipment. Consumption is counted continuously, including the idle draw of machines that must remain available whether or not transactions arrive, and the separate population of archival query nodes is treated explicitly rather than left ambiguous.

The result remains an estimate. Hardware profiles, utilization and the treatment of redundancy are inferred rather than observed, and where evidence is thin the assumption chosen is the one that raises the figure rather than lowers it, so the published number should be read as a conservative ceiling and is revised as observation improves.

Hedera is present on the following networks: Hedera Hbar.

The renewable share reported for Hedera begins with locating the machines. Consensus nodes are operated by named organizations listed in the network's published address book, and several of those operators disclose the regions or facilities in which they run, so a substantial part of the geographic picture is available directly rather than inferred. The remainder is resolved by the usual means: advertised network addresses are mapped to countries using publicly available network data, registry records and crawling of the peer-to-peer layer. Where some of the population still cannot be placed, the geographic distribution of a structurally similar network, meaning one whose participation rules and operating incentives resemble this one, stands in for the missing portion.

Located capacity is then matched to the electricity mix of the grid serving it. National generation statistics supply the proportion of electricity produced from renewable sources in each country, and weighting those proportions by the consumption estimated to sit in each country produces the renewable share for the network overall. Two limits follow from that construction. The share describes the grids on which the infrastructure happens to sit rather than any generation an operator has contracted for on its own account, and because the node set is small and concentrated in relatively few countries, the result is more sensitive to a single operator relocating or a single country's grid changing than it would be on a network of thousands of scattered machines.

Energy intensity is reported alongside the share and is a narrower quantity than an average. It is marginal: the additional electricity attributable to one further transaction, with the infrastructure held constant. On a network whose nodes run continuously irrespective of load, that marginal value is small and highly sensitive to the transaction count used as the denominator, so it can shift between reporting periods for reasons that have nothing to do with hardware. The grid statistics behind these calculations are taken from Share of electricity generated by renewables, compiled and processed by Our World in Data from Ember and from the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy.

Hedera is present on the following networks: Hedera Hbar.

Emissions attributed to Hedera use the same geographic picture as the energy analysis, applied to a different statistic. Once the consensus nodes have been resolved to countries, partly from the operator identities published in the network's address book and partly from advertised network addresses mapped through public network data and registry records, each location is matched to the average carbon intensity of electricity generation on that grid, expressed as greenhouse gas emitted per unit of electricity produced. Multiplying the electricity estimated to be consumed in each country by that country's intensity, then summing, produces the emissions total. Where part of the population cannot be located, the distribution of a structurally similar network substitutes for the missing portion.

The reporting distinguishes two categories. Scope 1 covers emissions from sources the operators of the network infrastructure directly control, such as fuel burned on their own premises. For a network of this kind these are negligible or absent, because the nodes consume purchased electricity and combust nothing themselves, and a reported value of zero should be understood in that sense rather than as a gap in the data. Scope 2 covers the indirect emissions embodied in the purchased electricity, and accounts for essentially the whole figure. The calculation applies average grid intensities at country level, so it reflects a national generation mix rather than any contractual arrangement, on-site generation or certificate purchase an individual operator may have made, and it does not net off offsets purchased outside the electricity system.

Greenhouse gas intensity is the marginal counterpart to the total: the additional emissions attributable to one further transaction, with the infrastructure held constant. It carries forward every limitation of the inputs beneath it, including an inferred hardware profile, uncertainty about redundancy behind each address book entry, country-level rather than site-level grid data, and a transaction count that varies independently of the infrastructure. Where evidence is thin, the assumptions chosen raise the result rather than lower it. Carbon intensity data is taken from Carbon intensity of electricity generation, compiled and processed by Our World in Data from Ember and from the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy, and made available under the CC BY 4.0 license.