Hedera Hashgraph’s HBAR token has seen a surge of over 15% after the U.S. Federal Reserve’s instant payments platform, FedNow, added Dropp, a Hedera-based micropayments platform, as a service provider. Dropp is an alternative to credit card payments which allows merchants to accept small-value purchases digitally without large transaction fees, according to FedNow’s press release. The platform allows micropayments in Hedera’s HBAR, the U.S. dollar, and Circle’s USDC. This move has brought the token’s market cap to more than $2.1 billion, a nearly 50% increase since mid-June.
Hedera Hashgraph is a uniquely structured blockchain compared to other chains due to its usage of hashgraph consensus. Hedera is the only public distributed ledger that uses this, according to the company, which notes that Hashgraph achieves 10,000+ transactions per second and low-latency finality in seconds. A report by Messari found that Hadera’s average daily active accounts have grown 288% year-to-date, jumping from 3,500 to 13,500 by Q2 2023. This surge in activity was mainly driven by non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and DeFi.
Hedera has seen a number of updates over the past few months. FreshSupplyCo (FSCO) integrated Hedera into its payment trigger API, and South Korean bank Shinhan Bank completed a stablecoin remittance proof-of-concept pilot built on Hedera’s open-source public network.