The Hedera Council today announced that it has voted to give the board approval to allocate 4.86 billion HBARs of additional funds toward further development of the Hedera network and enabling its decentralized governance.

Hedera is redoubling its commitment to ecosystem development, and as such, the vast majority of that allocation — 4.248 billion hbars — will be allocated by the Hedera Board among existing initiatives, including the HBAR Foundation, the Hashgraph Association, and the DLT Science Foundation. In accordance with their various agreements, the HBAR Foundation and Hashgraph Association will receive their grants within Q1, and the DLT Science Foundation will receive grants as milestones are met throughout the year.

Additionally, 614.06 million hbars will be used for the operational expenses of the Hedera Council and for payments to early SAFT purchasers.

“2023 saw the accelerated adoption of the Hedera network with more than 33 billion real world transactions on the network, and the ecosystem partners played a key role helping applications to go to market and onboard new users,” said Betsabe Botaitis, CFO of the Hedera Council. “With this foundation solidly in place, the Hedera Council is pleased to further support the development and utilization of the network with these new grants.”