Hiero

Hiero Turns One! Celebrating a Community-Driven Journey, Milestones, and What’s Ahead

Hiero Community |
Hiero Turns One! Celebrating a Community-Driven Journey, Milestones, and What’s Ahead

September marks an exciting milestone for Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust’s newest ledger project: Hiero! Over the past year, the Hiero project has grown from an ambitious idea into a developed, community-driven initiative along with other projects under the LF Decentralized Trust (LFDT) umbrella.

Hiero’s backstory

Hiero is an open source, vendor-neutral distributed ledger technology. It is used to build the Hedera network and includes the Hashgraph consensus algorithm and all core services, tooling, and libraries.

As we look back on Hiero’s journey, it’s important to recognize the dedication and collective effort from the community, which has continued to propel the project forward beyond its graduation phase and from its early beginnings.

When Hedera contributed Hiero to the Linux Foundation, it wasn’t just about releasing code but about reinforcing the values of openness, collaboration, and community-led growth. As Dr. Leemon Baird, Inventor, Co-founder, and Chief Scientist of Hashgraph, put it when Hiero launched:

“By contributing Hiero to the Linux Foundation, an organization with a long history of supporting open source and open innovation, Hedera demonstrates to council members, ecosystem partners, grantees, and the builder community that it is committed to growing the capabilities of its network through transparency and meritocracy.”

This vision has guided Hiero’s journey over the past year through the project’s successful graduation and continues to shape its milestones and the strong, diverse community that continues to develop around it.

Hiero’s year in review milestones

Since its launch in September 2024, Hiero, a vendor-neutral project focused on decentralized trust, has rapidly grown into a thriving community. The past year has seen the community achieve several important milestones.

  • Community Governance 
    In June 2025, Hiero held its first open elections to expand the Technical Steering Committee (TSC). Michael Kantor (Contributor seat) and Milan Wiercx Van Rhijn (End User seat) joined, followed by Brandon Davenport (Contributor seat) in July—strengthening community leadership and representation.

"Representing End Users on the Hiero TSC has been both exciting and meaningful.

Builders - the people and companies actually using the software - now have a direct say in where things go, and that’s a big step forward. What started as a roadmap for decentralization is finally becoming real through open governance, and I’m proud to help make sure the voices closest to the work are heard."

- Milan Wiercx Van Rhijn - Hiero End User TSC seat

“As Hiero celebrates its one-year anniversary as an LFDT project — and its graduation milestone — it’s clear the community has built something remarkable. With nearly 800 contributors and dozens of new projects contributed by organizations like OpenElements, Limechain, DSR, and Hashgraph Online, the ecosystem is growing stronger every day.

The next chapter is about deepening diversity and strengthening collaboration with cross-community efforts such as OpenWallet and Hyperledger AnonCreds, ensuring Hiero continues to evolve as a global decentralized trust platform.”  

-  Diane Mueller, Strategic Advisor, Hedera Foundation and LFDT Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Member

  • Engineering Excellence
    With 32 repositories governed under LFDT, Hiero follows best-in-class open source practices, including Apache 2.0/MIT licensing, CI/CD pipelines, OpenSSF Scorecard compliance, and transparent, community-first governance.

“I’m proud of the collaboration between LFDT and the Hiero community in developing processes for smooth, low-risk repository transfers into the Hiero-Ledger GitHub organization. Coupled with the community’s ongoing engagement around roles, responsibilities, and contributor pathways, this progress has been inspiring—and it’s exactly why I’m excited to serve as a maintainer and help shape Hiero’s journey toward its first anniversary and beyond.”

-  Roger Barker - Senior Software Engineer at Hashgraph

Hiero’s impact is already being recognized well beyond the open source community. Since February 2025, the Hedera network has been powered entirely by Hiero’s codebase, making it the largest public network ever built on an LFDT project. Beyond Hedera, solutions like HashSphere allow enterprises and governments to run private networks that stay fully compatible with Hedera. Tools such as HashPack and Hgraph and developer platforms like Hashgraph Online are helping everyday users and builders engage with the technology more easily. More details can be found in our adopters file.

Most importantly, Hiero is proving its value in the real world by cutting cross-border payment costs from $40 to just $0.10 and reducing settlement times from a week to under a minute, while also improving supply chain transparency by eliminating data mismatches and removing single points of control. These achievements show how Hiero is already delivering real, measurable benefits in finance, trade, and beyond.

Hiero's graduation last month signifies its maturity, achieved through rigorous evaluation of its legal, technical, community, and documentation aspects. While this status indicates a high standard of quality, continued TAC oversight ensures projects maintain these standards to avoid reverting to earlier lifecycle stages.

Hiero’s plans for the future 

Hiero’s graduation is more than a milestone for everyone involved. It signals that LFDT’s lifecycle framework and governance model can successfully guide projects to maturity while nurturing the communities that contribute to them. This achievement establishes Hiero not only as a technically robust platform, but also as a foundation for a broader ecosystem of decentralized trust.

Looking forward, the possibilities are endless! From digital identity and finance to supply chain integrity and sustainability, and across SDKs, smart contracts, and developer tooling, Hiero is positioned to enable the next generation of open, transparent, and verifiable systems. The project aims to establish the foundational trust infrastructure essential for the future digital economy.

We invite developers, enterprises, and communities to be part of shaping this future:

With its achievement, Hiero has proven what’s possible when innovation and collaboration come together. The next chapter is about scaling that vision. And that’s up to us. Come join the effort!

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Read what leading voices in the Hedera and LFDT community have to say on Hiero's accomplishments and future here.

To hear directly from ecosystem leaders, Hedera Council members, and project maintainers about Hiero’s journey, its impact today, and the opportunities ahead, join LF Decentralized Trust webinar with Hedera: One Year of Hiero - Celebrating Open Collaboration and Neutral Governance (September 17 at 7:00 am PDT).
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