Hedera Price Jumps 27 Percent: HBAR Outperforms the Market After the IBM Listing

Hedera's HBAR token stood at $0.1217 on September 28, 2026 at 12:48 UTC, 27.3 percent higher than 24 hours earlier (source: CoinGecko). The wider market moved the other way over the same window: Bitcoin gave up 1.8 percent, Ether 1.2 percent. The documented trigger is not a price fantasy but a corporate announcement dated September 23: Switzerland's Hashgraph Group said that IDTrust, its identity platform built on Hedera, had been validated by IBM and added to the IBM Cloud Catalog.

For you as an investor in Germany that splits into two questions, which this article answers separately. First: what exactly happened, and does it carry the price move? Second: if you want to buy, hold or sell HBAR, where does that run, what does it cost you in tax terms and where are the pitfalls in custody?

HBAR Price: 27 Percent in 24 Hours, 63 Percent in a Month

The figures come from a call to the CoinGecko interface on September 28, 2026 at 12:48 UTC. HBAR trades at $0.1217, equivalent to €0.1070. The intraday low of the past 24 hours was $0.0931. Roughly 31 percent lie between that low and the current level, so the move arose within a single day rather than growing over weeks.

Over longer windows the picture looks like this: plus 35.3 percent over seven days, plus 58.7 percent over 14 days, plus 62.9 percent over 30 days. Over twelve months, by contrast, there is a loss of 41.6 percent. Anyone who bought HBAR a year ago remains well behind despite this rally.

Market capitalisation is $5.33 billion, equivalent to €4.69 billion. That puts Hedera 25th among the largest crypto assets by market capitalisation. Trading volume over the past 24 hours was around $800 million, roughly 15 percent of market capitalisation. Volume on that scale means the move is carried by real trading and not by a handful of orders in a thin book.

43.83 billion HBAR are in circulation. The maximum supply is 50 billion and is fixed in the protocol. Around 88 percent of the total supply has therefore already been issued. In a separate piece on September 21 we described how Hedera's trading volume was then rising faster than its price. That gap has now closed in the other direction.

IDTrust in the IBM Cloud Catalog: What the Hashgraph Group Announced on September 23

The Hashgraph Group, or THG, is a Swiss technology company based in Schwyz that builds enterprise applications on Hedera technology. On September 23, 2026 it published an announcement with three concrete points, all of which can be checked.

First, IDTrust was validated by IBM and officially listed in the IBM Cloud Catalog. On THG's account it is thereby the first commercial Hedera-based enterprise application that can be bought directly as a software subscription through a major cloud marketplace. Second, THG reached IBM Silver Partner status, which is tied to technical certification requirements. Third, a global Embedded Solution Agreement with IBM was signed. That is a licence contract allowing a partner to build IBM technology into its own product and sell it as a single solution under its own name.

Stefan Deiss, co-founder and chief executive of THG, is quoted in the announcement saying that companies are deploying AI agents at scale that can negotiate contracts, process sensitive data and execute financial transactions on their own. The question exercising everyone, he says, is: how do I know this agent is authorised to act on my behalf? Naemi Benz, responsible at IBM for the partner ecosystem in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, is quoted as saying that IBM has recognised the commercial potential of Web3 solutions and that THG's work on agent-capable identity infrastructure on Hedera fits that.

Know Your Agent: Verifiable Identity for AI Agents as an Enterprise Topic

Behind the abbreviation KYA sits an extension of a term you know from finance. Know Your Customer (KYC) describes a provider's duty to establish the identity of its customers. Know Your Agent (KYA) carries that idea over to software: when an AI agent places an order or grants an approval in a company's name, the counterparty has to be able to check whether that agent is entitled to do so and who stands behind it.

For the urgency of this, THG's announcement cites a forecast from the research firm Gartner, according to which around 40 percent of enterprise applications should contain task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, against less than 5 percent in 2025. As further evidence it notes that Akamai launched its own agent verification procedure in June together with Visa and Experian. These figures and references come from the company's own announcement; they are a vendor's arguments for its own market and not an independent measurement of it.

Why this can matter for the price is easy to state soberly: Hedera has positioned itself for years as a network for companies rather than for speculation. An entry in the purchasing catalogue of a group such as IBM is a sales channel, not an advertising banner. Whether revenue follows, and whether that revenue ever reaches the HBAR price, is a separate matter and not settled by this.

DIDs, Verifiable Credentials and eIDAS 2.0: The Technology in the IDTrust Stack

By the provider's account, IDTrust is a platform for self-sovereign identity (SSI). The term describes a model in which a credential sits with its holder and does not have to be queried from the database of a central issuer.

Two building blocks carry this. A decentralised identifier (DID) is an identifier that can be created and checked without a central registration body. A verifiable credential (VC) is a digitally signed statement about the holder of that identifier, for instance that a particular agent is cleared for a particular task. Both formats are described at the W3C standards body, so neither is an in-house invention.

THG states that the platform is being aligned with the European eIDAS 2.0 framework, which governs the legal requirements for electronic identification in the EU. On the technical side the announcement also mentions MCP servers through which AI agents in IBM's watsonx Orchestrate environment can obtain their own identity credentials. Every credential issued is anchored on the Hedera ledger, which produces a record of permissions that cannot be altered afterwards without it showing.

According to the company, the application is already in use at a European telecommunications provider for checking caller identities. Alongside that, the announcement names partnerships from the past twelve months with the Merck group on EU digital product passports, with PwC on infrastructure for emission certificates, and with the logistics provider Teleport on customs documents in South-East Asia.

The Hedera Network: What HBAR Is Needed For in Proof-of-Stake Consensus

Hedera works with a proof-of-stake procedure in which a node's influence on consensus depends on how many HBAR are assigned to it. Under the official documentation, a transaction counts as confirmed only once nodes holding together more than two thirds of all staked HBAR have processed it.

Something practical follows from that: in this network HBAR serves both as the means of payment for fees and as the material the security of the system is made of. Every credential anchored on the ledger via IDTrust generates transactions, and transactions cost fees in HBAR. That is the path by which business use theoretically feeds through to demand for the token. How much that path carries in practice depends on volumes that Hedera does not disclose for individual applications.

On staking itself, the Hedera documentation names two points that are often misremembered in Europe. There is no lock-up period: staked balances remain available at all times and can be traded without waiting. The size of the reward is moreover set by the Hedera Council and updated on the mainnet; the market does not form it. Rewards do not expire, but they can only be collected for the most recent 365 days if no payout was triggered in between.

Distance to the 2021 All-Time High: 79 Percent, Rally Notwithstanding

A daily gain of 27 percent reads differently when you set it against the longer record. HBAR's all-time high is $0.5692 and dates from September 15, 2021. From the current level, 78.6 percent are missing to get there, so the price would have to more than quadruple.

Two levels are verifiable for the coming days and therefore more useful than any price target. On the downside, the low of the past 24 hours sits at $0.0931; if the price falls back there, the whole day's gain would be handed back. On the upside, the next objective reference is the level of twelve months ago, because only above that would buyers from the autumn of 2025 be in profit again, and at minus 41.6 percent that is around $0.208.

Everything circulating beyond that in the way of price targets comes from individual research houses and is their opinion. Anyone reading such figures should check whether a name and a date are attached. We deliberately name none here, because we could not verify a sound derivation for any of them.

Buying HBAR in Germany: MiCA Authorisation and the Route via an Exchange

Since the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, MiCA, has applied in full, trading platforms may only offer their services in Germany with an authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. For you that is the first test. A provider without that authorisation may not serve you here, and in a dispute you stand outside the European supervisory framework.

HBAR is listed on the large European venues, so buying it is not a niche exercise. What counts are the costs: the spread between bid and offer, the trading fee and, if you later move the token to your own wallet, the withdrawal fee. Those three items differ between providers far more sharply than the prices do. Which platforms are authorised in Germany and what they charge is set out in our comparison of crypto exchanges.

One note on sequence that is easily lost on rally days: buying on the day of a 27 percent jump means you pay for the jump. That is meant as a statement about your entry price, not as a warning. Anyone entering through a savings plan spreads precisely this risk over time.

Holding Period, Exemption Limit and Staking Income: The Tax Rules for HBAR

For private individuals in Germany, a gain on the sale of crypto assets falls under private disposal transactions per Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Two figures decide your tax burden.

The first is the holding period. Sell a coin more than a year after buying it and the gain is tax-free. Sell within the year and it is taxable at your personal income tax rate. The second is the exemption limit: if the total gain from all private disposal transactions in a calendar year stays below €1,000, no tax arises. Exceed the limit and the full amount is taxable, not merely the part above it. That is the difference between an exemption limit and an allowance, and in close cases it costs money.

Income from staking is treated separately by the tax authorities as other income. These inflows have to be recognised at the market value on the day they arrive, and a separate, markedly lower exemption limit applies to them. Because Hedera has no lock-up period and rewards arrive irregularly, active staking quickly produces a large number of small inflows, each with its own date and its own price. Without clean record-keeping that is barely reconstructible later.

This account does not replace tax advice. Where larger amounts, staking income or sales within the one-year period come together in your case, the case belongs with a tax adviser.

The Canary HBAR ETF on Nasdaq: No Route in for German Retail Investors

In the United States an exchange-traded product on HBAR has existed since the autumn of 2025. The quarterly report of the Canary HBAR ETF to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for the period to June 30, 2026 shows that the shares trade under the ticker HBR on Nasdaq and that the trust is managed by Canary Capital Group.

Two figures from that report are instructive. As at December 31, 2025 the trust held 473,456,805 HBAR with a fair value of $50.6 million. As at June 30, 2026 it held 663,209,584 HBAR, valued at $46.2 million. The number of tokens held therefore rose by roughly 40 percent while the dollar value of the holding fell. The product saw inflows in that half-year, and the price decline more than offset them.

For you as a retail investor in Germany the product is nonetheless not tradable as a rule. US funds do not produce a key information document under the European PRIIPs Regulation, and without that document brokers in the EU may not offer retail clients the purchase. Which exchange-traded routes exist instead with European authorisation, and how they differ from buying directly, is set out in our overview of crypto ETFs in Germany.

Storing HBAR: Account ID, Auto-Renew and the Most Common Traps

Hedera handles custody differently from the networks you know from Ethereum or Bitcoin, and that is exactly where withdrawals fail.

An address on Hedera is an account ID in the form 0.0.x. That account has to be created on the network before you can send anything to it. A freshly generated wallet with a key pair is not enough on its own. Anyone sending HBAR from an exchange to an account ID that has not yet been created risks the withdrawal failing or the funds being untraceable.

The second point concerns running costs. Accounts and entries on Hedera carry a renewal logic that incurs fees in HBAR. An account holding no HBAR for those fees is not an account you should leave unattended for years. So check three things before a withdrawal: that the destination account exists and that the wallet itself shows you the account ID, that you send a small test transfer ahead, and that the wallet supports the token at all.

If you hold larger amounts, the key does not belong on a device that hangs on the internet every day. That applies to any crypto asset capable of a triple-digit percentage move in either direction, and is no peculiarity of Hedera.

Hedera Rally: What to Take Away

The move has a documented trigger, and that trigger is a distribution agreement, not a revenue report. It is a distinction the price does not reflect on a day like this. Three steps that make sense regardless:

1. Document your holding periods. Note the purchase date, quantity and price for every HBAR holding before you think about selling. The one-year period decides the tax rate, and it cannot be created after the fact. Tools for it are in our comparison of crypto tax tools.
2. Recalculate the staking terms. Because Hedera has no lock-up period, the return is decided by the size of the reward and how it is recorded for tax; availability is a given anyway. How other platforms handle it is shown in our overview of staking providers.
3. Settle custody before you move anything. Create the Hedera account ID and test the withdrawal with a small amount. Which devices are suitable is set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

The sources for this article are the Hashgraph Group's announcement of September 23, 2026 and the official Hedera documentation on staking. Both can be read directly here: the Hashgraph Group announcement on the IBM partnership and the Hedera documentation on staking.

(As of September 28, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)