As we enter the second quarter of 2026, it’s a good time to look back at Hiero’s progress over the last year and map out goals for the rest of 2026.
From day one, Hiero has had an ambitious set of goals centered on establishing a strong open source foundation as a new project under the LF Decentralized Trust umbrella, growing its community, and demonstrating that the project could thrive under open governance. In 2025, Hiero hit a number of important initial milestones including:
2025 was more than launching a new project. It was about building the operational, governance, and community structures needed for long-term sustainability. With that foundation now in place, 2026 is shaping up to be a year focused on accelerated adoption, stronger contributor pathways, strengthened security, transparency practices, and new opportunities for innovation in the open.
Hiero’s 2025 annual review highlights a growing GitHub organization, increasing contribution activity, strong CI performance, and an expanding set of public collaboration opportunities.
As the project reached maturity, scalability in the open became more evident. Hiero’s community calls continue to evolve into a richer collaboration environment with more focused groups for contributors to engage. The community also is expanding efforts around onboarding, mentoring, marketing, and maintainer development opening the doors for more opportunities for the community.
Across the SDKs and other subprojects, maintainers are refining contribution guidelines, onboarding processes and tools, and collaboration practices to make it easier for developers to get involved and stay engaged. Overall, the team is focused on investing in long-term sustainability of the project as we continue to grow.
Over the last 12 months, a number of new technologies have joined the Hiero ecosystem. As a vendor-neutral home for open development, Hiero is becoming a place where new ideas, specifications, tools, and implementations can evolve under transparent and open governance.
Among the notable additions to the ecosystem are subprojects such as Hiero Heka Identity Platform, Hiero Ethereum Client Spec, Hiero CLI, Hiero Hederium, and Hiero Consensus Specifications. These projects represent an increased growth of Hiero’s technical reach across decentralized identity, developer tooling, Ethereum compatibility, interoperability, and standards stewardship.
This development was featured at Hedera DevDay 2026, where the community highlighted several bold “moonshot” initiatives now being developed in the open under LF Decentralized Trust by the Hiero community. This event highlighted Hiero’s ongoing innovation efforts and opened opportunities for new contributors to be part of the roadmap.
In recent months, 15 Improvement Proposals were reviewed and approved. This reflects an active governance process and a community willing to formalize ideas, evaluate changes with the community’s participation and align around strategic direction.
This metric shows that open governance is not only about transparency, but it is also about creating reliable processes for decision making. Hiero’s review, approval, and adoption of improvement proposals helps reinforce confidence that the project can scale both technically and organizationally.
The Hiero community is focused on establishing new channels for community participation. Community calls multiplied, contributor guidelines became more defined, and the project committed to open discussions to the public where the community can express their opinions.
The Good First Issue initiative and Hackathon opportunities are becoming an important part of that effort. Maintainers across multiple SDKs are working to make beginner-friendly issues more visible, more structured, and more usable as a learning (and mentoring) opportunity. This initiative is helping build a better path for new contributors to measure their growth in the community and acquire more expertise.
Hiero also introduced a new Junior Committer role, giving new contributors a clearer progression model and expanded opportunities to participate in issue triaging and issue administration which reduces potential bottlenecks.
While Hiero has made strong progress in project health and participation, maintainer diversity remains an area of focus this year. Hiero’s 2025 project report captures this ongoing effort through new measures focused on expanding diversity across leadership, maintainership, and project representation.
This challenge is not unique to Hiero and this fact encourages the community to develop strategies that will reflect positive results in Hiero and that can be leveraged by other projects.
Hiero’s 2026 goals reflect an exciting roadmap for bringing the project to the next level.
The community is prioritizing long-term sustainability by growing a more engaged contributor base and improving the project’s ability to retain both contributors and maintainers. This includes continued outreach at public events, stronger expectations around maintainer responsiveness, and more ways for contributors to build skills with confidence.
Security and trust remain foundational priorities. Hiero is continuing to strengthen release and security practices, improve code health, and raise OpenSSF scores across project components. These efforts are designed to support both contributor confidence and production readiness.
Maintainers for each Hiero component and subproject are encouraged to maintain and communicate their roadmaps. The goal is to create more transparency in planning while supporting better coordination across the ecosystem.
Hiero is increasingly serving as the open governance home for specifications and reference implementations that emerge from standards work related to the ecosystem. The emphasis is on ensuring those efforts are reviewed, maintained, and published with clarity and consistency.
Training is becoming a more visible priority. The community is actively working toward mentorship participation and exploring workshops and certification opportunities that can help new contributors better understand the project and build meaningful involvement over time.
Adoption needs to be made more visible and easier to understand. That means documenting use cases, building more meaningful adopter materials, and working with marketing contributors to better showcase how Hiero is being used across different industries.
The project’s innovation work continues to evolve in the open. The moonshot initiatives introduced publicly at Hedera DevDay 2026 represent a strong signal that Hiero intends to remain innovative while keeping its most ambitious work transparent and accessible for the community to be part of it.
Hiero also sees 2026 as a year to strengthen collaboration across the wider LF Decentralized Trust ecosystem. The community is looking for more opportunities to work alongside other projects through workshops, integrations, and shared innovation efforts.
As the project continues to grow, two areas stand out as especially important and challenging: mentorship and cross-project collaboration.
On the mentorship side, maintainers are preparing ideas that can help bring new talent into the project through structured programs and issue progression initiatives across multiple projects within the GitHub organization. On the collaboration side, the community is eager to build stronger connections across the broader ecosystem and create more opportunities for shared technical work with other LF Decentralized Trust communities.
These priorities align closely with Hiero’s long-term vision which focuses on growing as an independent project and, at the same time, strengthening its role as part of a larger open source ecosystem.
The Hiero community continues to welcome new contributors, collaborators, and project participants. Whether your interests are in standards, SDKs, core infrastructure, decentralized identity, developer tooling, governance or adoption there are growing opportunities to get involved. Participate in real time conversations in Hiero's Discord channels.
To follow the project’s ongoing plans, we welcome you to participate in community discussions and share your feedback on the 2026 goals. The Hiero community is excited to welcome new talent and adopters into the project.