Last year, in January 2025, Dominic Williams just wrapped up a fireside chat alongside Kimbal Musk. The topic was blockchain, AI, and the self-writing internet. But then the moderator invited a few guests onto the stage for a group photo, and one of them walked up and asked to make a quick announcement.
That someone was Kamal Youssefi, President of the Board of The Hashgraph Association. The Hashgraph Association is a Swiss-based nonprofit that drives the global adoption of Hedera technology. And what he said in the next two minutes was quietly one of the more significant partnership announcements in either ecosystem’s history up to that point.
“We finally found three use cases where we are going to collaborate with our partners at DFINITY. And I believe that combination is going to be unbeatable.”
He didn’t say what the three use cases were exactly, but more on that in a moment.
Hashgraph: Hedera uses a directed acyclic graph, which allows transactions to be recorded and ordered in a more parallel, efficient way.
Canisters: Smart contracts on ICP that can store data, and serve web content directly. More powerful than typical smart contracts.
Chain Fusion: ICP technology for natively integrating with other blockchains without using bridges.
Before we get into the partnership, I’ll give a quick explanation on Hedera for anyone who focuses primarily on ICP:
Hedera Hashgraph is not a traditional blockchain. Instead of arranging transactions in a linear chain of blocks, it uses a structure called “directed acyclic graph”. The result is a network capable of processing over 10K transactions per second with finality in under 3 seconds, very low fees, and a carbon footprint so small that the network is actually carbon negative.
What makes Hedera stand out in the enterprise space isn’t just its tech though, but its governance too. The Hedera Council is a governing body made up of major global organizations such as Google, IBM, Dell, Deutsche Telekom, Ubisoft, and as of February 13th this year, FedEx. Council members actually run network nodes and vote on protocol decisions. It’s the kind of institutional credibility that makes regulators and enterprise teams far less nervous than they would be with a permissionless chain run by anonymous validators.
Hedera’s weaknesses, historically, have been on the smart contract and developer tooling side. Its EVM compatible smart contracts work fine, but they don’t offer anything close to what the ICP canister model delivers when it comes to on-chain computation, storage, and AI integration. That’s precisely where ICP comes in.
Kamal Youssefi and Dominic Williams officially announced the collaboration on January 25, 2025. But the details were sparse, and that seemed on purpose. This partnership is aimed at advancing on-chain finance, sustainability, and consumer engagement.
Those three things align with what Youssefi said on stage.
In his own words: Hedera brings “the sustainability aspect when it comes to energy consumption when it comes to a lower carbon footprint... and another aspect which is needed for institutional adoption, which is governance, combined with the great and powerful smart contract structure that the guys at ICP managed to develop over the last few years, including powerful AI components.”
What he described is a logical division of labor. Hedera brings the institutional trust layer, the enterprise governance, and the energy efficiency narrative (which also applies for ICP), while ICP brings the compute layer: canisters, on-chain AI, sovereign infrastructure.
The three use cases are worth thinking through, even speculatively.
On-chain finance: Hedera’s secure and efficient consensus system complements ICP’s powerful smart contract technology. Hedera previously enabled the tokenization of bonds and real estate, demonstrating practical financial use cases. Combining that track record with ICP’s advanced smart contracts could unlock more complex and secure financial solutions.
Sustainability: Although most of the time this is a buzzword, environmental concerns have always somewhat slowed blockchain adoption. Hedera offers a solution with its minimal carbon footprint. When combined with ICP’s powerful data processing and decentralized AI, this partnership could push sustainability standards forward.
Consumer engagement: Hedera’s quick, low-cost transactions combined with ICP’s powerful and fast smart contracts can enable applications that users genuinely enjoy. The ICP canister model could serve the front-end, while Hedera could handle the high-throughput transaction settlement layer.
The framing from Youssefi was deliberate: “Competition is good, collaboration is better.” Neither side in this partnership is trying to absorb the other. They’re trying to build something neither could build alone.
This proves the point I have been making for years: “The future is multichain, and ICP has more chances to succeed the more chains it integrates. Tribalism is stupid, and we should all focus on collaboration.”
Here’s where things get interesting if you’ve been paying attention.
Following last year’s announcement, the ICP community was a bit confused. A DFINITY forum thread from January 2025 titled “Partnership with HBAR?” had people asking whether anyone could find a link to an actual formal announcement. The answer was basically “no”.
But silence doesn’t mean nothing is happening. Fast forward to last month, and someone on X asked Pierre Samaties, DFINITY’s Chief Business Officer, for an update on the Hedera collaboration.
His reply was: “Ongoing, friends from Hedera Hashgraph are joining the event as well. We will provide an update regarding the collaboration, once it’s ready to announce.”
The event he was referencing was World Computer Day, Davos 2026, which took place January 20th this year. Hedera’s team was indeed present at Davos during that week.
So the partnership is ongoing. Both sides are at the same events. The Hedera team was specifically cited as attending a DFINITY event. And Pierre Samaties explicitly said an update is coming when it’s ready.
Now here’s the piece that makes this a genuinely compelling story right now.
On February 13, 2026, FedEx announced joining the Hedera Council. FedEx joins to help advance trusted digital infrastructure that can support the evolving lifecycle of global shipments and make supply chains smarter for everyone.
Let that sink in: FedEx does $90 billion in annual revenue, it has over 500,000 employees, and it’s a global logistics network spanning 220+ countries.
“The digital transformation of global supply chains is inevitable,” said Vishal Talwar, vice president of FedEx. “As supply chains become increasingly digital-native, trusted data must be shared and verified across many parties without increasing risk or centralizing control. Hedera provides a neutral, enterprise-grade trust layer that enables verification at global scale.”
As a Council member, FedEx will operate a node on the Hedera network and hold equal voting rights alongside other members, participating directly in the governance of Hedera software and services.
This is significant for the ICP/Hedera partnership for a reason that might not be immediately obvious: it validates Hedera’s exact value proposition in the partnership. Hedera brings institutional credibility and enterprise governance. FedEx joining the Council is the clearest possible demonstration that this credibility is real and expanding. The kind of organizations that ICP needs to reach, Fortune 500 companies with compliance requirements and legal teams who ask hard questions, are exactly the kind of organizations that are comfortable sitting at Hedera’s table.
Now let me put on the speculation hat for a moment. Everything in this section is me thinking out loud, not reporting facts. But I think it’s worth exploring because the logic actually holds up.
What if DFINITY joined the Hedera Council?
The Council currently has 31 members out of a maximum of 39, which means there are open seats. Members come from technology, finance, telecom, energy, gaming, and academia. DFINITY would fit right in. It’s a Swiss foundation building decentralized enterprise infrastructure. That’s exactly the profile Hedera recruits for. And unlike most Council members who are just users of distributed ledger technology, DFINITY would bring something unique to the table: deep expertise in building one.
Council members run nodes on the Hedera network and get equal voting rights on protocol decisions. For DFINITY, joining would mean a direct seat at the governance table of one of the most (if not the most) institutionally connected networks in crypto. It would also mean direct relationships with Google, IBM, Dell, Deutsche Telekom, FedEx, and every other Council member.
For Hedera, bringing DFINITY onto the Council would signal something powerful to the market. It would be the first time a major Layer 1 protocol joined another Layer 1’s governance structure. That alone would generate serious attention. But more practically, it would give Hedera direct access to the team building the most advanced smart contract and on-chain AI infrastructure in the space. The exact capabilities Hedera lacks are the ones DFINITY has spent years developing.
Now let’s go one step further. What if Hedera ran a subnet on ICP?
This is also speculative, but hear me out. ICP’s architecture is built around subnets, independent groups of node machines that host and run canisters. We just saw the first TEE subnet go live for confidential computing, the Swiss national subnet launched at Davos, and a new Pakistani subnet announced just a few days ago. The system is designed to be modular and expandable.
There’s nothing in ICP’s architecture that would prevent a Hedera specific subnet from existing. A subnet where Hedera’s consensus data is natively accessible to ICP canisters. Where smart contracts on ICP could read and write to the Hedera network without going through bridges or oracles.
The benefits of that would be significant for both sides. Hedera developers would gain access to ICP full compute stack: on-chain storage, web serving, AI, autonomous canisters. ICP developers would gain access to Hedera’s transaction layer: fast, cheap, enterprise-trusted settlement with built-in institutional governance. The two networks would stop being separate ecosystems and start being complementary layers of the same stack.
For HBAR holders, this would mean their network becomes the preferred settlement layer for one of the most computationally powerful blockchains in existence. For ICP holders, it would mean direct integration with a network that has Google, FedEx, and IBM sitting on its governance council.
Is any of this confirmed? No. But is it technically feasible and strategically logical? Absolutely.
Here’s where things stand. ICP and Hedera announced a partnership in 2025. Three use cases were hinted: DeFi, sustainability, and consumer engagement. Technical specifics were held back. A few weeks ago, Pierre Samaties has confirmed the collaboration is ongoing. Hedera’s team attended World Computer Day at Davos 2026. FedEx just joined the Hedera Council on February 13th, validating Hedera’s institutional track record in concrete terms. And an update, per Pierre, is coming when it’s ready.
To all my ICP friends, keep this in mind: The people involved are credible, the use cases are logical, and the institutional credibility behind Hedera is very real. When the technical announcement finally drops, it’ll land in a much more favorable environment than it would have a year ago, because both ecosystems are stronger now.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading. And if you want more ICP articles like this one delivered straight to your inbox, consider subscribing to my Substack.
Talk to you later. BasedGiant.
Fireside Chat, Kimbal Musk & Dominic Williams
HBAR Announces Major Partnership with ICP
The Hashgraph Association and DFINITY Partnership
Pierre Samaties on X, Partnership Update
FedEx Joins Hedera Council, FedEx Newsroom
FedEx Joins Hedera Council, Hedera Blog
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