A Comprehensive Overview of the Top 10 Best Hedera Hashgraph Projects

Introduction

Hedera Hashgraph is a platform that leverages distributed ledger technology but not in the traditional blockchain sense.Unlike traditional blockchain-based platforms, Hedera uses a decentralized acyclic graph (DAG), a system that allows for faster and more secure transactions. This unique consensus mechanism, known as hashgraph consensus, enables Hedera to achieve high throughput with over 10,000 transactions per second and low-latency finality in seconds. The platform offers a set of APIs for creating accounts, minting tokens, writing data to the ledger, and calling smart contracts. These services have attracted major companies like Boeing, Google, IBM, and LG, contributing to Hedera's wide adoption.

Hedera Hashgraph, with its unique consensus mechanism and governance structure, is poised to disrupt a multitude of industries. Its applications extend across supply chain management, digital identity, cryptocurrency, smart contracts, gaming, predictive markets, file storage, and Internet of Things (IoT). This broad spectrum of use cases demonstrates the versatility and potential of Hedera Hashgraph. One of the key areas where Hedera Hashgraph is making a significant impact is in the creation of a more reliable passive-income market. This is a testament to the growing maturity of the crypto sector. Hedera Hashgraph offers a more sustainable and practical yield model, moving away from the unsustainable token emissions and manipulative strategies that have been prevalent in the past. This approach not only enhances the security of the platform but also ensures fairness, which is a cornerstone of Hedera Hashgraph's philosophy.

The total addressable market (TAM) for Hedera Hashgraph is challenging to pinpoint due to its wide-ranging potential. However, given its capacity to disrupt various industries and applications, the scope is vast. As Hedera Hashgraph continues to evolve and mature, it is set to redefine the landscape of distributed ledger technology and beyond. In this comprehensive guide, we will dive into the world of DeFi on the Hedera network. We will cover the top ten projects operating in the Hedera ecosystem, exploring their unique offerings and value propositions.

Top 10 Hedera Hashgraph Ecosystem Projects

SaucerSwap

SaucerSwap (website) is a decentralized exchange (DEX) that operates on the Hedera network. It offers a comprehensive suite of decentralized finance (DeFi) services. SaucerSwap's innovative approach is based on an automated market maker (AMM) protocol, which facilitates the trading of digital assets and ensures liquidity on the exchange. The platform incentivizes liquidity providers by rewarding them for contributing their tokens, thereby injecting liquidity and earning rewards. Beyond token swaps and staking to liquidity pools, SaucerSwap also offers yield farming and single-sided staking, both of which further increase DEX liquidity by encouraging participants to stake or invest cryptocurrency.

As of now, SaucerSwap has achieved impressive traction with over $20M in total value locked and over $100M in total swap volume. The platform's success is backed by its innovative team, including co-founder and operations co-lead Peter Campbell, who appreciates Hedera's advantages in speed, trust, and cost. SaucerSwap's current status is robust, with recent developments focusing on expanding its suite of DeFi services and enhancing its governance structure. The platform leverages the Hedera consensus service to support its governance structure, providing a transparent and immutable log of platform policies. Looking ahead, SaucerSwap has an exciting roadmap that includes the addition of services such as community pools, gamified features, and social functionality.

The platform's native token, SAUCE, serves multiple functions including liquidity provision, staking, and governance. At the platform's genesis, 200 million SAUCE tokens were minted, with the remaining 800 million being released according to a schedule. The total supply of SAUCE is capped at 1 billion tokens.

Hashport

Hashport (website) is an enterprise-grade public utility that enables the secure and efficient movement of digital assets between distributed networks. It simplifies the process of interoperability, allowing users to easily and securely transfer their assets across various networks. This functionality unlocks the potential for users to explore new opportunities within the distributed ledger technology (DLT) space. Hashport leverages the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) and Hedera Token Service (HTS) to validate user-submitted transaction requests quickly and cost-effectively, enhancing user confidence in the platform.

To date, Hashport has successfully migrated over 150 million tokens and has a total value locked (TVL) of over $2 million, with a transaction volume exceeding $100 million. The platform's success is backed by its innovative team, including Director of Business Development Jesse Whiteside, who acknowledges Hedera's ability to deliver speed, security, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use. Hashport's current status is robust, with recent developments focusing on enhancing its interoperability solution. Looking ahead, Hashport aims to support the interoperability needs of the future for digital assets with fast transaction speeds, low network fees, and a high level of security.

Zuse Market

Zuse Market (website) is a NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) marketplace built on the Hedera network. In simple terms, it's like an online store where people can buy, sell, and explore digital collectibles known as NFTs. These NFTs can be anything digital that's unique, like digital art, music, or even virtual real estate.

The platform is innovative in its mission to make NFTs simple and accessible. It enables both secondary sales and provides an NFT launchpad service for projects building on Hedera. This means that artists and creators can launch their unique digital creations on Zuse Market, and users can buy and trade these NFTs. The platform has seen significant traction, with a total volume of over 170 million HBAR. The HBAR Foundation, which supports projects that leverage the Hedera network, has partnered with Zuse Market. This partnership will allow Zuse to improve its technology infrastructure and the user interface/experience of the site, enabling it to become a premier NFT marketplace and drive further adoption of the Hedera network. As of now, Zuse Market continues to thrive as a hub for NFT transactions on the Hedera network, with ongoing developments focused on enhancing its technology and user experience.

Heliswap

HeliSwap (website) is a DEX platform that supports tokens within the Hedera ecosystem. It is a fork of the Uniswap v2 protocol, bringing popular DEX features to the Hedera Hashgraph. HeliSwap is designed with a community-centric approach, aiming to provide an intuitive, secure, and transparent DeFi experience. Heliswap has over $2 million in TVL. The platform's products and features are built with the belief that DeFi should be easy to use for everyone, ensuring the platform's long-term viability while fostering a vibrant and engaged community.

HeliSwap's native token, $HELI, serves as a transferable representation of several utility functions, including governance, liquidity, and staking. The token is built using the HTS (Hedera Token Service) and serves as the backbone of the DAO structure while also rewarding active users of the platform. The total supply of $HELI tokens is 888,888,888, allocated to different buckets and released gradually over the next 5 years (60 months) following HeliSwap’s emission schedule. The vesting period is linear and linked to time passed rather than blocks. The $HELI token serves as the governance token of the DAO, used to participate in proposals and voting. A portion of HELI tokens is used for liquidity provision incentives to reward participants of HeliSwap’s Yield Farming product. HeliSwap also offers yield returns in exchange for locking tokens into their smart contracts, with the HELI token being usable on their staking platform. The supply of the HELI Token is not expected to change, with any potential increase in supply requiring a community-created and voted proposal in the DAO.

Stader Labs

Stader Labs (website) is a non-custodial smart contract-based staking platform. It is designed to put the community and its needs at the center of everything they do, with the goal of making DeFi easy to use and intuitive for everyone. Stader is backed by a dynamic leadership team with over 60 years of total experience in management and leadership roles across technology, growth, and strategy. The team includes Amitej, the CEO and Co-founder, Sidhartha, the CTO and Co-founder, Dheeraj, the Protocol Lead and Co-founder, Gautam, the General Manager for Hedera and Bnb, Anoothi, the General Manager for NEAR and Terra 2.0, and Vibin, the General Manager for Fantom and Polygon.

Stader for HBAR

Stader for Hedera is the first liquid staking solution for HBAR backed by the Hedera Foundation and has over $20 million in TVL. It allows users to earn HBAR staking rewards without needing to maintain infrastructure and enables users to participate in other DeFi strategies while accruing rewards. Stader's native token, SD, is the governance and value accrual token for Stader. It is an ERC-20 token with a limited supply capped at 150 million tokens. The SD token allows users to participate in various governance-related aspects of the Stader protocol, including decisions about rewards, validator selection criteria, protocol expansion, and more. Users can stake SD tokens and earn a share of protocol fees as staking rewards, provide SD liquidity across DEXs to get SD incentives, and receive preferential delegations to validators based on the amount of SD tokens staked.

Hashgraph.name

Hashgraph.Name (website) is Hedera's premier naming service, providing a distributed, open, and extensible naming system built on the Hedera Hashgraph. It serves as an extension of the user in the web3 and Hedera ecosystem, tying human-readable names like 'baird.hbar' to machine-readable identifiers such as Hedera addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata. This service is similar to Ethereum’s naming service, allowing users to set their Hashgraph name as the reverse record for their Hedera wallet address.

Top-level domains, like '.hbar' and '.name', are owned by smart contracts called registrars, which specify rules governing the allocation of their subdomains. This allows anyone to obtain ownership of a domain for their own use by following the rules imposed by these registrar contracts. Due to the hierarchical nature of Hashgraph.Name, domain owners at any level can configure subdomains for themselves or others as desired. For instance, if someone owns 'baird.hbar', they can create 'leemon.baird.hbar' and configure it as they wish. This system provides a flexible and user-friendly approach to managing digital identities on the Hedera network.

Calaxy

Calaxy (website), a portmanteau of "creators galaxy," is a Web3 social crypto marketplace built on the Hedera network. Designed by creators for creators, including NBA player and tech entrepreneur Spencer Dinwiddie and ex-financier Solo Ceesay, Calaxy aims to transform the creator economy. It provides a platform where creators can offer more direct and intimate experiences to their fans, fostering more meaningful and fulfilling interactions compared to traditional social media landscapes.

Calaxy's innovative approach is attracting a diverse range of NBA players, professional athletes, and talent, all recognizing its potential to deepen direct fan engagement and expand the crypto universe to the masses. It serves as a Web3 onramp for mainstream audiences, creating a fair exchange of value by enabling creators to monetize relationships with their community through Creator Tokens. Calaxy has successfully raised $26 million in strategic funding, co-led by Animoca Brands and HBAR Foundation, with additional support from Polygon. It is one of the first applications built on The Creator's Galaxy Protocol, allowing fans to buy Creator tokens directly within the application using fiat and eventually $CLXY.

Headstarter

HeadStarter (website) is the Hedera ecosystem enabler, serving as a crucial component in DeFi and paving the way towards mainstream adoption and exponential growth of retail-focused dapps. It is designed to support early-stage projects on the Hedera network that are struggling to secure the necessary support, resources, and promotion. HeadStarter provides accelerator-level support every step of the way, from idea to listing, offering these projects public visibility and a streamlined decentralized funding process through its own fundraising platform built on Hedera.

HeadStarter's mission is to enable the success of promising distributed applications on the Hedera network. It facilitates fundraising and provides the tools and assistance needed for launching disruptive dapps that bring real-world value and innovation. Through industry-leading DeFi standards, smart contracts enabled gamification and tokenization, HeadStarter powers fair, decentralized, regulatory-friendly public funding and token launches for the highest quality Hedera dapps. The fundraising component of HeadStarter's support for dapps is done through initial decentralized offerings, or IDOs.

Bitcarbon

Diamond Standard and Bitcarbon (website) are leveraging the Hedera network to tokenize diamonds, creating a transparent, traceable, and easily tradable commodity. This innovative approach has unlocked the investment potential of diamonds, a market that has been significantly under-allocated until now due to barriers to entry. Diamond Standard has developed a system that uses AI and machine learning algorithms to evaluate diamonds, which are then certified by the International Gemological Institute. These diamonds are organized into standardized collections, each represented by a unique token with a common grading system and a verifiable digital identity.

Bitcarbon, offered by Diamond Standard Ltd., is a fungible token based on Diamond Standard’s physical Coins and Bars. A single Diamond Standard physical Coin is worth 5,000 Bitcarbon and a physical Bar is worth 50,000 Bitcarbon. Bitcarbon is intended to be an alternative to traditional stablecoins, offering a stable, inflation-hedged commodity token that is a true store of wealth. The Bitcarbon token is backed by a dynamic pool of the commodity and enables fractional investment opportunities. The Bitcarbon spot price is DIAMINDX as reported by Bloomberg, the market value of one coin. The Bitcarbon Ratio is $5,000.00 per Diamond Standard Coin and the Bitcarbon Spot is $1.054 (DIAMINDX divided by the Bitcarbon Ratio).

Dovu

Dovu (website) is accelerating the path to net zero by enabling the transparent digitization and crypto trading of carbon at scale and speed. Built on the Hedera network, Dovu uses the Guardian, a solution that multiple organizations can connect to and use tools like satellites, AI, and heatmaps to receive accurate, traceable, and trusted data for the Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) process. This allows for the transparent audit trail of standards and methodologies, making Dovu methodology-agnostic. Each onboarded project chooses its suitable methodology, facilitating community responses to methodologies, and adding rating systems such as BeZero to all projects.

Their innovative solution, cDOV, is an elastic supply token that is pegged to the real-world value of carbon. This token adjusts or rebases its supply to tend toward the current price of carbon, providing a fair representation of the value of carbon held by each token. The cDOV tokens are minted to support the passive offset of an individual's carbon footprint, up to a limit, to disincentivize large holdings that could risk market manipulation. Once cDOV tokens are traded into DOV, they are burned, representing the conversion of potential carbon offset into real value.

The cDOV token system is designed to incentivize the distribution of cDOV over multiple wallets, providing opportunities for all participants to passively offset their carbon footprint.

Final Thoughts

The projects built on the Hedera network are diverse, innovative, and are making significant strides in their respective fields. A common trend among these projects is their commitment to leveraging the unique features of the Hedera network, such as high throughput, low latency, and strong security, to deliver solutions that are not only technologically advanced but also user-friendly and accessible. They are harnessing the power of distributed ledger technology to disrupt traditional systems and create new opportunities for individuals and businesses alike.

Recent developments across these projects indicate a strong momentum towards growth and expansion. Whether it's enhancing existing features, introducing new services, or forging strategic partnerships, these projects are continuously innovating and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with Hedera Hashgraph. As these projects continue to evolve and mature, they are set to redefine the landscape of distributed ledger technology and beyond, promising an exciting future for the Hedera network and its community.