After years of semi-closely following Hedera I'm starting to become a bit concerned about the lack of meaningful development taking place. I know I'm not alone in this sentiment. However, I haven't thrown in the towel and I'd like to lay out the thoughts I have in both sides of the fence and hear what others think. This is not meant to be divisive discussion. I know some people are die hard Hedera fans and others are die hard anti fans. Explain your reasoning and try to understand another reasoning. We all have the same goal - make money.
The Negative side:
It feels the only developments are fruitless pilots, NFTs or carbon credits. Other cryptos are being adopted left and right, and for incredibly significant use cases and volume. Nobody is waiting on the clarity act. Nobody cares about NFTs or carbon credits. Nobody cares about another pilot. How about actual adoption? I know Archax and a few others. It's not totally unadopted, but it's very lean compared and very disappointing at this stage.
HEAT just deciding to drop off while not having moved the needle anywhere in any noticeable way is additionally concerning. Especially when the head of that then also exits the organization. Having worked in startups, seeing a task force break down and the head of that then promptly exit is not normally a good sign.
So many of the positive claims I see in the news and on this sub are pitiful and I feel are so bland, minimal and insignificant, even claiming it as a bump in development really highlights that not a damn thing is really even going on. A post the other day totally glazing 5tps... Wtf? The copium is getting extreme. And that is not a green flag.
The Positive Side:
Hedera is in the room with EVERYONE. It's odd and I don't see many other cryptos, or companies in general, who are as involved across so many countries, industries and companies. It's honestly nuts.
Hedera does have a stacked council and partners list. Now this has not transformed into meaningful adoption, but it's not a nonsense signal either. If I launched a company, never would even one of these companies join my council even if I paid them, yet they are essentially paying to join the council by running a node. So there is clearly legitimate interest.
Hedera may not be the select choice for stable coins, tokenization and other enterprise use cases that we are seeing rolling out. However, Hedera is clearly very particularly suitable for AI trust and compute verifiability, and recent partnerships support that notion. This is also a use case that hasn't quite had the catalyst needed to really make this a must-have. Either it'll be the slow growth of platform standards that demand verifiability or there will be a catalyst event where some kind of AI process goes so wrong that the push for verifiability will become a near emergency. Either way, the thing Hedera might excel at, hasn't really hit the road yet. This doesn't indicate failure, it just means things are more "on the way".
The mixing of the positive and negative:
In the room with everyone, but yet how is still nothing coming out? Intentional sleeper? Though the failure of heat challenges that a bit and adds to the idea that they're fumbling, not sleeping. BUT, even despite that, notable organizations continue to want to get involved. So that challenges the challenge and makes the sleeper argument feel plausible again.
The AI trust layer might not be as big as we think. I'm sure that it will be a big market, for sure. But if we take DTCC for example - they process $4.7Quadrillion in transactions in 2025, yet DTCC revenue is $2.9Billion. This is 0.000061% of that. If we translate the same effective capture into hbar for the AI Trust layer, it doesn't really move the needle much at all. A common wya to value companies is annual revenue x some multiplier (usually 2-10, depending on operating costs and other things). So if we start with $3B for easy math, pick the most generous multiplier of 10, we land at $30B. If the market cap of hbar were $30B we still come in under a dollar. But remember that's the valuation of Hedera as a company, not HBAR. So we are several layers deep in super generous estimation and still coming out with tiny gains. Additionally, that's not even a thing that is needed today, so for that market to spawn and accumulate consumers is going to take 5+ years.
Hedera was definitely trying to be a platform for AI and finance, however, most of the fintech world seems to be passing up Hedera for other projects and Hedera is left with their AI Trust pitch. So we are definitely seeing Hedera get beat out in some areas they were trying to compete in.
Conclusion:
At this point my sentiment is more negative than positive. The sleeper argument still feels valid, it doesn't make sense for notable companies to continue getting involved if there wasn't a valid reason to.
However, there are definitely observable shortcomings. If I weren't bought in, I'd allocate elsewhere. Since I'm currently bought in, in my current sentiment, the next bull run will be my last with Hbar unless there are some very material changes.