The technology behind Hedera, the hashgraph consensus algorithm, was developed by Dr. Leemon Baird — a computer scientist, former professor, and instructor at the US Air Force Academy — around 2015–2016. Together with his friend and business partner Mance Harmon (a technology executive, also with a US Air Force Academy background and cybersecurity experience), they founded Swirlds, Inc. (a portmanteau of “shared worlds”) to commercialize the technology.
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May 31, 2016: the Hashgraph whitepaper is published.
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March 13, 2018: Leemon and Mance announce the launch of the Hedera Hashgraph project at an event in New York; in 2018 they raise roughly $100 million through funding rounds (including a notable ICO).
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August 1, 2018: it becomes public that the project's valuation had reached $6 billion — well before the token was even publicly tradable.
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August 24, 2018: mainnet goes live in private beta, with the founding Hedera Governing Council.
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September 2019: official public mainnet launch (“Open Access”), HBAR begins trading on US and Asian exchanges, kicking off a planned 15-year issuance schedule.
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2022: the Hedera Council purchases the intellectual property rights (including patents) to the hashgraph algorithm from Swirlds, then open-sources the code under an Apache 2.0 license.
Hedera*'*s governance model is uniquely rare in crypto: the Hedera Governing Council consists of up to 39 leading global organizations across industries, each running its own network node with equal voting rights and term-limited membership — ensuring no single entity can gain control of the network. Past and current council members have included Google, IBM, Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, Standard Bank, Nomura, Tata Communications, FIS, and Chainlink Labs.