No leader, no mining, no votes on the wire. Council nodes gossip about who told whom what, and each one works out the same order of events on its own.
Click a step on the right, or use the arrow keys, to jump to it. Hover a node to see who runs it.
Every transaction that reached consensus counts once, under its type: HBAR and token transfers, consensus-service messages, smart-contract calls, EVM transactions relayed from Ethereum wallets, and so on. Transfers always get the first colour; the six busiest other types get the rest.
| Block | Transactions per type |
|---|
Use the left and right arrow keys to read each block's count.
| Block | Transactions | Succeeded | Failed | Closed |
|---|
Instead of one block at a time, Hedera's nodes keep a graph of events. Each event is signed, carries transactions and a timestamp, and points to two earlier events by their hashes. Because the hashes chain backwards, nobody can alter history without breaking every pointer that follows. The record stream, which is what wallets and explorers read, is produced from the graph after ordering.
Mainnet consensus runs on nodes operated by the Hedera Council: term-limited members such as Google, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, LG, Ubisoft, Dell and Standard Bank, spread across many countries. Each node is listed by the network with its operator and city, which is what you see when you hover a node. Hedera is opening node operation up in stages, from council nodes to permissioned community nodes and eventually anyone with enough stake.
Classic Byzantine agreement needs rounds of vote messages between all nodes. Hashgraph gets the same guarantee from the gossip history itself: since every node ends up with the same graph, each can calculate how every other node would have voted. That is virtual voting. The result is asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance, meaning that as long as more than two thirds of the nodes are honest, the order is final and can't be reversed.
A transaction's consensus timestamp is the median of the times the nodes first heard of it, so no single node can push its own transactions ahead of others. Finality arrives in a few seconds: once ordered, a transaction is settled and the mirror nodes publish it. There are no confirmations to wait for and no chance of a fork.
Fees are fixed in US dollars and paid in HBAR at the current exchange rate: a simple transfer costs about $0.0001, a consensus-service message roughly the same, and a contract call more. Fees aren't burned. Part goes to the node that took the transaction, the rest to the network's staking-reward and treasury accounts. A transaction that fails its checks at consensus, like a bad signature, still pays.
Live mode reads Hedera's public mirror node, the REST API that publishes everything once it has reached consensus. Each violet dot is a real transaction flying to the node it was actually submitted to, and each block on the record strip is real, with its number, hash and count. The gossip syncs and events between nodes aren't published, so live mode doesn't draw the hashgraph. Fees, transaction types and failures are real.
Real gossip never pauses for a step: syncs, round assignment and virtual voting all run continuously and overlap. Rounds here have a fixed number of events per node; on the network a round ends when strong seeing is reached, which varies. Read the Hedera documentation or the hashgraph paper for the full algorithm.