HBAR’s Crazy Transaction Stats

It all started with a tweet:

Wow, a big claim. It’s been a big year for ETH, but HBAR is 4 times more? What gives?

By far the biggest source of transactions are from the Hedera Consensus Service. From Dragonglass, HBAR’s explorer:

So what is this ” Consensus Service” anyway? According to Hedera’s own website:

TL;DR it’s a bunch of log messages and it turns out there’s a lot of them. In fact, the consensus service appears to be HBAR’s edge in the blockchain space (as a Vechain competitor?). Except HBAR isn’t a blockchain at all – its a messaging system built on top of a number of centralized databases. There are no blocks, slots, epochs etc.

Dragonglass also shows 21 council nodes, emphasizing the centralized narrative (although to be fair a number of other chains have similar low validators). And five DApps which I was told were awesome (like AdsDax) which didn’t look busy at all (most of AdsDax’s traffic is in the events). There are 600 tokens which mostly look to be test/meme tokens that aren’t busy either.

It’s closed source and run by one company. The claimed 10000+ TPS is only for wallet to wallet transactions and slows to around 13 TPS when smart contracts are used (it uses Ethereum’s VM). Smart contracts can be removed by the governing body and there are a ton of red flags on this project, which Eric Wall shows here. He also describes the Consensus mechanism in great detail and knows more about blockchains (and HBAR) than I ever will.

So where do these consensus messages come from? Dragonglass shows 10 addresses for the day, of which two of them had a million transactions each (0.0.41107 and 0.0.89748).

Pulling an example tx for 0.0.89748 (an unknown Dapp): a450c58a3c77beee9494972258a4c2757262fa2e3ae499886ac6e8150ec458bab9c438a2b2f4808291c01659f0da4772 ->

{"blockchain":"ethereum","block_hash":"0xa40b7624abababd47a0681d45922ee7139158bcdd1e29fdb8809ec9b05fe2cc5","transaction_hash":"0xa11e888b28a3b6b8a23b926ec1ac7c273fec009c709561768c4a77b601dba089","parent_block_hash":"0xfa560886c49be7845fb5e877c18c8cd29765dfa9849ec8303900ccf6b7dff842","block_height":12908215,"message_id":"ce0aad4aa54bb2f3c075242c411233cb81322e641483b96f94d3fd7577e96bd4"}

Etherscan shows this to be Uniswap v2 exchange tx. Playing with a number of these showed what appeared to be an unrelated list of Ethereum transactions. Huh? So a million HBAR transactions/day point to transactions on the Ethereum network. One day I’ll find out why.

Pulling a random message out of 0.0.41107 (AdsDax): (daee5275e921e253bdaf9dd3f9402ea4b77826dee04cd1f694d7ef978e26d9956ea2cddb9868c1a887323e09bc8804e3) and putting it through a hex->ASCII converter showed the following:

{"v":2,"p":{"a":"2900","p":"9656","s":"1","t":1627693264884,"i":"0.0.41107@1627693254.928354578"},"s":"UI1flDckyw3ym35SyFf24DeEGLRpwu8P/L65BdRLBpIQLrPGlF2cfzumKWFb7NVFXal+KJdIRXI6QhSmJe5W5AmSJ4O8vs921PVFBv7xrqbMPQIlj1ARcMnbEYIbDZmZ+sT0Pt60cxsMbg3SAXX/gODzSWJXjSIwANHvdKwJTsxlrUO57uC21MfUzLAlmbjBd8uhQ40/3tFOkHhdfFvLgT8YfMs3SvjCCCmskjLU9vNz6fR1LH4OVZrjzHM3/op+5aKYsp3LqFNXTsE="}

At first this looks like base64, but decoding it doesn’t work. Not too sure what this is under the covers and more work on AdsDax is required to pull this one apart.

So essentially half the traffic is due to two apps – some sort of Eth transaction tracker and AdsDax in which the Hedera website quotes over 2millon events (not transactions) per day.

AdsDax appears to the be major DApp in HBAR’s arsenal with some pretty big claims that it is an Ethereum killer (see here). At face value it appears to a way to track clicks and present content.

So maybe Hedera Hashgraph does have a life – as an event logger.