2026 Annual Review Hiero¶
Project Health¶
2025 was a very exciting year for the Hiero project. Not only the project achieved graduated status in time for its 1st year anniversary, but it also continues to grow considerably in terms of projects adopted, contributions, community meetings and overall media/event exposure.
GH Organization Overview¶
Today, Hiero includes 42 active repositories supported by contributions from nearly 500 authors and continues to gain strong momentum and popularity across the open-source community. The project's performance is also recognized by its strong CI processes which only registered 8% of job failures and an average queue job time of less than 5 minutes.
Community Calls¶
As Hiero’s community continues to grow, so does the variety of collaborative project calls. The project has expanded its community meetings to reflect the many dimensions of its development and initiatives. Among the most recent efforts is the continued work in Good First Issues, designed to ease the barrier of entry for new contributors and create a clear pathway for learning and career growth. SDK teams are actively refining contribution guidelines and onboarding documentation to provide a more structured and supportive learning journey for developers interested in collaborating in the project.
In addition, Hiero has launched a dedicated marketing community call, bringing contributors together to collaborate on documentation improvements, website enhancements, brand visibility, and event engagement. Maintainers have also introduced a new monthly sync designed to enhance overall goal alignment and provide a space to share ongoing initiatives, adopt best practices and share project effort ideas. Additionally, we have introduced a mentorship call, where maintainers and aspiring mentors coordinate opportunities to support mentees and expand participation across the community in an effort to acquire new talent.
Alongside its established project calls, Hiero offers a diverse and growing set of opportunities for contributors at every stage to get involved, learn, and be part of the project’s future.
Project composition¶
Hiero is actively looking for opportunities to expand and optimize its technology via project adoption.
In recent months, Hiero has stood out for welcoming the following projects into the ecosystem. Some notable examples include: - Heka Identity Platform - a ready-to-use decentralized identity (aka Self-Sovereign Identity or SSI) solution for the Hiero ecosystem. - Hiero Ethereum Client Spec - a comprehensive Python-based framework and collection of test cases designed to generate standardized test vectors for Ethereum execution clients. - Hiero Identity Standards - a dedicated home for identity-related standards under Hiero governance. Its purpose is to host, version, and maintain specifications that define how decentralized identity standards are implemented on Hiero networks. - Hiero CLI - a command-line interface designed to simplify, automate, and accelerate development workflows on Hedera and Hiero networks. - Hiero Hederium - a Golang implementation of the existing hiero-json-rpc-relay that complies with the Ethereum JSON-RPC Standard. - Hiero Consensus Specifications - a canonical repository for Hashgraph Consensus Standards (HCS), which define application-layer metaprotocol specifications built on the Hiero Consensus Service.
It is also important to highlight that at the most recent Hedera DevDay, the team unveiled several ambitious “moonshot initiatives” that are now being actively developed in the open under LF Decentralized Trust within the hiero-ledger GitHub organization. These forward-looking efforts signal a meaningful evolution in the project’s trajectory, representing a transformative step toward shaping Hiero’s future through transparent, community-driven innovation.
Improvement Proposals Adopted¶
A total of 15 Improvement Proposals were reviewed and approved by Hiero's Technical Steering Committee.
Maintainer Diversity¶
The Hiero project has welcomed new project proposals into the organization. However, maintainer diversity has not seen a considerable change compared to the previous year.
Instead, there is a slight difference in the positive side. However, in terms of work in progress to work on diversity, there is a great amount of work being done by the existing maintainers which is described below.
Maintainers across the SDKs are working on a Good First Issue Initiative to build a developer growth path to build maintainers. These efforts are currently in progress in the public meetings for Hiero SDKs, Community Management and Good First Issue calls. Currently, these are the following results noticed and challenges faced in this initiative:
- New guidelines are being implemented in the project which help build the foundation for a well structured initiative.
- A new role, Junior Committer, has been formally adopted in the community. This role will allow triage permissions to its members to allow them to manage issues more efficiently.
- The list of organization wide good first issues are being processed at a high speed. While this is a great achievement for the project, it also becomes a bottleneck since the community is always in need for beginner friendly issues that the community can use to jump start new contributors.
- The team behind this initiative is in need of more support to be able to replicate this work across more SDKs and, eventually, all core components of the project.
- While we have seen a great number of new contributors joining this effort in some SDKs, for example the Python SDK, the community is focusing on ways to continue this momentum and recruit the participation of current maintainers across other projects to do the same.
Project Adoption¶
Hiero remains committed to strengthening organizational diversity within its governance leadership. The upcoming 2026 elections present an important opportunity to broaden representation by welcoming the participation from additional organizations and reinforcing the project’s commitment to build an inclusive, vendor-neutral, and community-driven governance.
Goals¶
Performance Against Prior Goals¶
The year 2025 marked a big milestone for the Hiero project, as the community focused on delivering its first open source release and advancing the project toward technical and governance maturity in the TAC. The priorities during that year were centered on establishing a strong baseline for the project as well as successfully transferring the project into an open source state. At the same time, significant emphasis was placed on promoting the project within the broader open source community and establishing a strong, credible introductory presence. The goal was not only to launch Hiero technically, but also to ensure it was visible and well recognized as a strong initiative.
In contrast, the goals for 2026 reflect a natural progression from launch to continued momentum. With the foundational work now in place, the project is focused on accelerating growth, expanding adoption, and building upon the stability achieved in the previous year 2025 to continue to drive long term impact and growth.
From those goals, is worth presenting the following comparison:
| Goal | 2025 Result | 2026 Work in Progress |
|---|---|---|
| Project Health | Hiero completed the transition of all Hedera repositories under LFDT and expanded the ecosystem with additional community projects. The project enabled the onboarding of new contributors and the advancement of community members into maintainer roles. Hiero formalized its open governance model and launched weekly public meetings to ensure transparency and collaborative planning. | Hiero is continue momentum with the approval of several projects into the ecosystem including: Heka Identity Platform, Hiero Ethereum Client Spec, Hiero Identity Standards, Hiero CLI, Hiero Hederium, Hiero Consensus Specifications and currently working on several new project proposals during 2026. In terms of strengthening our current projects, the maintainers are working on improving OpenSSF scoring and strengthening security and code quality best practices. |
| Maintainer Diversity | Building a diverse community was a priority for Hiero in 2025, with contributors and maintainers representing multiple companies, independent developers, and a growing number of new committers worldwide. The project added community projects such as the hiero-solo-action project attracting contributors from regions like India and Africa, and independently created Python SDK tutorial content—demonstrating expanding global engagement. | While this continues to be a challenging goal, the community is building new talent via our Good First Issue Initiatives as well as introducing a new "Junior Committer" role that will help potential maintainers grow in the community. These initiatives are being prepared for a formal project proposal in our LFX Mentorship programs. The team continues to make new connections with interested community members from our featured events. Maintainer re-engagement is also part of our new goals that will be in development during 2026. |
| Project Adoption | The TSC is represented by Hedera, Hashgraph, Hashgraph Online and Limechain (end users and maintainers represented). During these elections, our ADOPTERS.md grew to 50+ companies adopting Hiero. | In 2026, the project will maintain verified references, architecture diagrams, and user quotes to contribute to the meaningful content of our adopters information. We are also committed to work on user case research and case studies that can feature Hiero in recent news. The team continues the progress on project promotion in Hiero and LFDT events with participation in mentorship programs and workshops to invite new community members to be part of our development. |
2026 Year's Goals¶
The Hiero TSC and community is committed to focus on the following 2026 goals:
| Scope | Purpose | Progress |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Project Participation & Engagement | Strengthen Hiero’s long term project sustainability by growing a diverse and engaged community as well as develop measures that help us keep contributors and maintainers interested and participating in the project. | In recent public events, we continue to promote our project opportunities for collaboration. At the same time, the team is raising constant awareness to the maintainers on the importance to stay active, available and responsive. We are working in new ways to help contributors and existing contributors to stay engaged and build their skills confidently. |
| 2. Security & Supply Chain Transparency | Improve Hiero’s overall security posture and strengthen supply chain transparency across all components. Establish a reliable, verifiable, and trustworthy foundation that protects users and contributors while supporting secure growth of the Hiero projects. | The team is reinforcing security and release best practices as well as continuing to revisit code health and OpenSSF scores and work towards improving them. |
| 3. Core Components & Sub-Project Roadmaps | Following Hiero’s graduation to a fully community-led LFDT project, each core component and sub-project is responsible for maintaining its own technical roadmap and reporting progress to the Hiero TSC. These roadmaps serve as transparent planning documents and enable cross-project coordination within the broader LFDT ecosystem. | Maintainers are being encouraged to provide more visibility and openness into their project's development. We will continue to create opportunities for projects to feature their roadmaps in community calls and publications including events and blog publications. |
| 4. Specifications Stewardship & Reference Implementations | Hiero Ledger serves as the open, community-governed home for specifications and reference implementations derived from Hedera’s standards work — such as HCS-based specifications and decentralized-identity methods. The 2026 objective is to strengthen consistent, transparent practices for maintaining, reviewing, and publishing standards under open governance. | We promote openness and clarity on the creation and reinforcement of current specifications. |
| 5. Training | Continue Hiero’s promotion to the community by welcoming opportunities for new talent to learn and understand the project’s goals. Provide exciting opportunities for collaboration and engaging ways to drive more diverse talent and adoption. | At the moment, the team is actively working on submitting at least one mentorship program and will continue to work on creating new workshops and certification opportunities. |
| 6. Ecosystem Adoption & Integrations | Demonstrate real world Hiero adoption by documenting diverse use cases across the industry. Publicly showcase meaningful references for project adoption. | With the recent creation of the marketing community call, the team looks forward to engaging with the marketing leaders on discovering opportunities for project adoption and use case features. |
| 7. Innovation & Future-Readiness | Ensure Hiero remains at the forefront of emerging technologies. The intent is to position the project for future readiness by validating new concepts through research, prototypes, and cross-project collaboration. | With the introduction of the latest project initiatives during Hedera DevDay, maintainers are working on promoting participation as this work is being developed in the open. |
| 8. Cross-Project Collaboration Targets | Strengthen alignment and technical collaboration across the broader LFDT ecosystem and key partnering projects. Create meaningful integrations and workshops that reinforce interoperability and shared visionary innovation. | We welcome the participation of new collaborators from different industries and we are committed to continue strengthening our connections outside of the project to create opportunities for collaboration. The team is working on more project exposure as well as workshop initiatives that can help create more project awareness. |
While the Hiero community continues to expand its initiatives to foster and acquire new talent, it remains a challenge overall to progress on this goal.
As a community, we would like to continue to raise awareness on the importance for maintainers and contributors to stay connected with the community participating in their project. This includes tracking community calls, project perception and quick response and turnaround to PR requests. Internally, we want to also encourage Technical Steering Committee members to stay engaged with as many areas of the project as possible and to continue to provide their expert guidance to drive the project in the right direction.
Overall, this is an importan goal to keep in mind for 2026 as it becomes the foundation for other goals to produce great results.
To view the complete list of Actions, Measures and Responsible parties for these goals, please follow our GH Discussion. Everyone is encouraged to provide your comments in the GH discussion's comments section.
Help Required¶
While we are working on post graduation goals at this point in time in Hiero, we would like to focus on both mentorship oportunities and cross project collaboration.
On the mentorship side, our maintainers are working closely to participate in several ideas which will be presented as a project proposal soon.
Regarding cross project collaboration, we would like to ask the TAC to help enable opportunities for cross project collaboration between Hiero and other ecosystem projects.
Project Lifecycle Status Recommendation¶
The Hiero project requests to keep the current Graduated state.
Hiero has demonstrated sustained growth in adoption, contributor engagement, and technical maturity which reflect the expectations of a Graduated LF Decentralized Trust project. The community continues to expand in both scalability and diversity supported by new structured onboarding pathways, mentorship/certification initiatives, and a clear progression model that enables contributors to evolve into confident maintainers.
In addition, Hiero has established a solid set of 2026 goals focused on strengthening contributor retention, expanding project visibility, introducing certification and training opportunities, and enhancing the project’s overall security posture and release reliability (among others). These commitments are designed to continue reinforcing the project’s health and strategic direction.