This month’s Hedera Highlights showcase major strides across finance, AI, and policy. The Reserve Bank of Australia and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre's Project Acacia has selected Hedera technology for its wholesale CBDC pilot. EQTY Lab's Verifiable Compute has taken a big step by launching its platform on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture. In the UK, Lloyds, Aberdeen, and Archax completed the first institutional FX trade using tokenized assets. Regulatory momentum continues with the U.S. CLARITY Act and the UK’s digital finance strategy. Meanwhile, Hedera To Earn launched with 24M+ users, and the Hello Future Hackathon kicked off with a $550K prize pool.

The Hello Future: Origins Hackathon is in full swing, with builders worldwide competing for $550K in prizes—you can still join until August 8. This month also marks the release of Hedera Agent Kit v3 and the start of the migration to Hiero, unifying Hedera projects under a new namespace. Plus, new HIP proposals aim to boost scalability and security, and a Consensus Service price update is coming in 2026.

As previously announced in September 2024, Hedera projects have migrated to Hiero under Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust. This significant evolution involves a critical namespace transition from hashgraph to hiero or hiero-ledger, affecting project dependencies and SDK imports. This shift emphasizes greater transparency, collaboration, and open-source innovation, and developers are encouraged to update their dependencies accordingly to stay aligned.

As we continue in our series exploring REITs in web3 - diving into the key features and components that make up our end-to-end RWA/DeFi solution - we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of both real-world asset tokenization in general as well as Hedera’s role within this emerging industry. In doing so, it is essential to feature thought leaders and industry partners within the space to provide you with the fullest picture possible of what the potential future of tokenized real estate looks like.

Starting in January 2026, the price for the ConsensusSubmitMessage transaction on the Hedera network will increase from $0.0001 to $0.0008 USD. This change applies only to the ConsensusSubmitMessage operation used in the Consensus Service (HCS).

It should be no surprise that Hedera is positioned for leadership in AI, especially agentic AI as one of the co-founders of Hedera, Dr. Leemon Baird, received his PhD in 1999 from Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Baird’s PhD in Computer Science is entitled, “Reinforcement Learning Through Gradient Descent”.

HIP-1217 enhances Hedera Mirror Node APIs by modularizing contract execution, delivering more accurate gas estimates, and consistent node behavior. To maintain smooth application performance, developers must prepare for these non-backward compatible changes beginning September 1, 2025.

This month, we're launching the Hello Future: Origin Hackathon with $550,000 in prizes, kicking off July 21. Dive into the pre-release Hedera CLI for streamlined account management and smart contract deployment. Don't miss insights from the latest Technical Community Call, and be sure to review the newly proposed HIPs 1215 (scheduled contract calls) and 1217 (modularized contracts call API).

In this month’s Hedera Highlights, we’re excited to welcome two new Council members: Arrow Electronics and Blockchain for Energy (B4E). The Hedera Foundation continues to advance the future of trusted AI through key partnerships with EQTY Lab and Accenture, while further expanding the ecosystem with new strategic collaborations and use cases. We also reflect on a successful day in Washington, D.C., where Hedera leaders engaged with policymakers to shape the future of digital innovation.