Hedera is a fast, fair, and secure public distributed ledger that offers two primary services, the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) and the Hedera Token Service (HTS), used to incorporate decentralization into new or existing applications. These two services enable data integrity and tokenization with the performance, security, and stability of Hedera Hashgraph, offering trust and verifiability for applications in healthcare, retail, finance, agriculture, supply chain, and more.
On October 22nd, the Hedera Token Service (HTS) was released on the previewnet — this offered developers the chance to use, test, and provide feedback on HTS in an alpha version of the latest Hedera Service Codebase (v0.9.0). We can’t thank the Hedera Developer community enough for their support in testing HTS and providing invaluable technical feedback, bug fixes, and more.
Today, we’re excited to announce that HTS is now available on the Hedera testnet. It’s accessible to developers via v1 and v2 (with v2 offering support for key/signature schemas) of the officially-supported Hedera SDKs (Javascript, Java, and Go) and a community-supported SDK (.NET). As HTS continues to develop and eventually made available on the Hedera mainnet in 2021, a core focus is to support a flourishing token ecosystem; this includes integrations into exchanges, wallets, custody providers, and more.
In addition to the availability of HTS on testnet, Hedera has created the “Tokenization on Hedera Whitepaper”. This whitepaper details the two primary models Hedera Hashgraph supports for tokenization — natively on Hedera, using the Hedera Token Service, and in a permissioned network setting, using Hedera Consensus Service. Tokenization on Hedera introduces the technical fundamentals of each and aims to assist token issuers with determining the deployment model most appropriate for their application use case.
To get started using HTS on testnet, you’ll need to create a Hedera Portal profile and follow the step-by-step instructionsstep-by-step instructions. Once you’ve set up your testnet environment, you can get started by following the “Getting Started with Hedera Token Service” blog posting, parts 1, 2, and 3, by developer evangelist Cooper Kunz.
HTS on the testnet is accessible to developers via v1 and v2 (with v2 offering support for key/signature schemas) of the officially-supported Hedera SDKs (Javascript, Java, and Go) and a community-supported SDK (.NET).
To use HTS on testnet, you'll need to be operating a Hedera mirror node or using a mirror node API that supports the service. Both Hedera and the Hedera developer community have made mirror node APIs that support HTS on the testnet.
You can see all the Hedera official and community-supported network explorers and mirror node API services on the Hedera network explorers page. Mirror node API's which support HTS are found below:
HTS-Supported Mirror Node APIs
Hedera has created and open-sourced an HTS demo application, written in Javascript (Vue.JS), to illustrate how to use this new service. The demo enables developers to understand the fundamentals of:
Join the discussion about the Hedera Token Service on Discord in the #Hedera-Token-Service channel for feedback and community support. We can’t wait to see what types of applications you’ll build.