Hedera’s HBAR token is one of the two names behind Eric Wade’s “No. 1 Crypto Play for 2025” at Stansberry Research, and it is a lesson in why the label “crypto play” can mislead. HBAR is not a stock and does not represent equity in anything. It is the native token of the Hedera network, a distributed ledger governed by a council of large companies. Here is what the token actually is, what the pitch claimed, and where it stands now. For the full backstory, see our How to Stake HBAR: What You Need to Know article.

What HBAR Is

HBAR is the native token of Hedera, a public distributed ledger built on a technology called hashgraph rather than a conventional blockchain. The token pays for transactions on the network, participates in staking that helps secure it, and functions as the fuel for the applications running on top of it. Owning HBAR does not make you a shareholder of Hedera; it gives you a unit of a network’s utility token.

That distinction matters more than most newcomers realize. A stock has earnings, cash flow, and legal ownership. A token has none of those. Its value rests entirely on demand to use the network it powers, which is a very different basis for a price than a company’s profits. See our what is HBAR crypto explainer for the plain-language version.

The Council Governance Story

Hedera’s best-known feature is its governance. The network is overseen by a council of large, well-known organizations, including Google, IBM, Boeing, Dell, and LG. That corporate backing is unusual in crypto and is often held up as proof of legitimacy. It is real, but it is worth being precise about what it means: these companies help govern the network. They are not buyers of last resort for the token, and their participation does not guarantee that HBAR’s price rises.

The council structure is genuinely one of Hedera’s differentiators versus more loosely governed projects, and it has helped the network land enterprise-flavored use cases. But governance legitimacy and token price are different things, and the promo leans on the former to imply the latter.

The Tease Versus Reality

Wade’s pitch teased HBAR around $0.29 in early 2025. The token trades near $0.08 now, roughly 70% below that tease price. That gap is the single most important number for anyone evaluating the pitch today. The “No. 1 Crypto Play for 2025” promo is a re-run of material first circulated in January 2025 that has resurfaced late in 2026, and the token is well below where the original pitch priced it.

This is not a verdict on Hedera’s technology, which is real and has genuinely interesting performance characteristics. It is a verdict on the promo’s timing. A reader arriving now is not getting the same entry the original ad described. You can read the full re-run analysis in our No. 1 crypto play teardown.

The Performance Angle

To be fair to the pitch, the underlying technology has real selling points. Hedera can process on the order of 10,000 transactions per second and uses a tiny fraction of the energy of Bitcoin per transaction. Those are legitimate technical advantages, and they are part of why the network has attracted corporate governance interest. Our Hedera transactions article covers the speed and efficiency numbers in detail.

The honest summary is that Hedera is a technically interesting network whose token has fallen far since the pitch first ran. Whether that fall is an opportunity or a warning depends on whether the network’s usage grows enough to create real demand for HBAR, and that is a question no amount of council branding can answer in advance.

What the Council Does Not Do

It is easy to read the list of council members, Google, IBM, Boeing, Dell, LG, and infer that the token is somehow backed by those companies. That inference is wrong, and it is worth stating plainly. The council governs the network’s software and direction; it does not back the token’s price, hold it as a reserve, or promise to buy it. Membership is a signal of institutional interest, not a floor under the price.

That distinction matters because the pitch leans on the corporate names to imply safety. A token governed by respected companies can still fall 70%, as HBAR has, because governance and price are different things. The council makes Hedera interesting to enterprises; it does not make the token a low-risk asset, and treating it that way is the specific misunderstanding the marketing invites.

The Bottom Line

HBAR is the utility token of the Hedera network, governed by a council of household-name companies and technically distinct from most blockchains. It is not a stock, it carries no earnings or equity, and it trades around 70% below the price Eric Wade’s pitch teased. The technology story is real; the promo’s timing and framing are stale, and those two facts should be weighed separately.

Ready to see the research? Click here to access Eric Wade’s report.

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