- Hedera Hashgraph token has retreated by over 28% from the YTD high.
- The developers welcomed Hitachi and AP+ into their governance council.
- Hedera faces some substantial challenges in the blockchain industry.
Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) price has pulled back in the past two weeks even after some encouraging news in the ecosystem. HBAR, which peaked at $0.1017 on January 2nd, has pulled back by more than 28% to $0.073. This retreat has brought its total market cap to over $2.4 billion.
Hedera Hashgraph’s token has retreated even after the network unveiled a major partnership with Hitachi America. The partnership saw the company join the governance board, which also includes other big companies like Google, IBM, Tata, and Servicenow. This was a notable thing because of Hitachi’s scale since it is the 9th biggest Japanese company with over $72 billion in market cap.
Hitachi will also use Hedera to power its blockchain projects, especially in areas like Internet of Things (IoT). This is notable since the company is well-known for building products across all sectors like building, smart cities, health care, and energy, among others.
Hitachi was quickly followed by Australian Payments Plus (AP+), which also joined as a governance council member. This is another notable development since AP+ handles billions of transactions every day. As a result, there is a likelihood that it will use Hedera to power its payments and tokenized services. Mary Lam, the CEO said:
“With distributed ledgers, payments organizations like AP+ can benefit from increased transparency, enhanced security, and improved efficiency in transaction processing.”
Hedera’s key challenge is that it has a relatively small market share in areas that are popular industries in the blockchain industry like Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and gaming. While Saucerswap is growing, it is still smaller than popular exchanges like Orca, Jupiter, and Uniswap.
Hedera Hashgraph price forecast
The daily chart shows that the HBAR token price has come under pressure recently, mirroring the performance of Bitcoin, which retreated from $49,000 to $38,500. It then formed a small hammer pattern, a popular bullish sign. Hedera has also retreated below the key support level at $0.076, its highest point on August 15th.
Hedera Hashgraph price is between the 50-day and 100-day Exponential Moving Averages (EMA). Therefore, the outlook for Hedera is neutral for now. A bullish breakout will be confirmed if the price moves above the key resistance at $0.076. A move above that price will see it soar to the key level at $0.085, which is about 15% above the current level.
