Charles Adkins, the CEO of The HBAR Foundation sat down with Proof of Talk to discuss all things Hedera & DeFi.
During the podcast, Adkins discussed Hedera’s governing council, energy efficiency, DeFi, and the network’s ecosystem growth.
Over the past few months, Hedera has made an effort to grow their decentralized ecosystem by incentivizing developers and onboarding new web3 creators.
HBAR Foundation Charles Adkins on finding a balance with Hedera’s ecosystem
During the podcast, Hedera’s Charles Adkins commented on HBAR’s institutional focus alongside current goals to grow Hedera’s DeFi ecosystem.
This year, multiple new developer funds and incentives have been launched, targeting DeFi growth on Hedera Hashgraph.
Web3 companies such as Thrive Protocol have recently invested $4 million in Hedera decentralized development alongside a significantly large fund allocation from the Hedera Council.
During the podcast, Charles Adkins commented on Hedera’s recent TVL (Total Value Locked) growth and how recent grants for developers are making a difference when it came to onboarding new creators.
Speaking on Hedera’s institutional, regulatory direction and whether compliance with regulators might affect Hedera’s search for DeFi growth, Adkins responded that such compliances are inevitable as crypto and blockchain networks mature.
During the podcast, Adkins gave his thoughts on crypto regulations around the world and criticized the SEC’s previous stance on cryptocurrency regulation.
For the HBAR Foundation CEO, Europe’s MiCA framework has been clear and straightforward for cryptocurrency firms.
The podcast ended with Adkins hinting that privacy integrations would be coming to the Hedera ecosystem in the form of zero-knowledge proofs, allowing users to make private transactions or share data with an extra layer of secrecy.
Making sense of Hedera Hashgraph hints and partnerships
After HederaCon 2025 during EthereumDenver, a lot of focus has been shifted to potential digital integrations with Swift banking and additional enterprise use cases.
For many HBAR investors, it’s better to wait and see what Swift or such institutions will do first, before jumping to conclusions on half-truths that may or may not have been said during recent conferences.
In light of recent conflicts, Hedera’s HBAR token has shown strength since Bitcoin’s volatile drop under $85k, with HBAR up 23% over the last 7 days. Shortly after HederaCon, the ticker ‘HBAR’ was a trending topic among investors within the “ISO compliant” token crowd.
According to Canary Capital’s CEO Steven McClurg, Hedera and Ripple were two of the most talked about cryptocurrency companies at ETHDenver, proving that the institutional interest in HBAR is very much rooted in reality.
