Hedera’s HBAR Stuck at $0.083 Despite JPMorgan Endorsement, Merck Deal, and $93M in ETF Inflows

Key Highlights

• HBAR trades near $0.083, below the $0.095 resistance level, with all three major moving averages positioned above current price.
• Canary Capital's HBAR spot ETF has recorded over $93 million in net inflows since launch, with only a single day of outflows.
• A mid-June open interest surge of 40% alongside a 98% volume spike explains short-term price volatility despite positive fundamentals.
• JPMorgan Asset Management named Hedera the preferred public-permissioned DLT for tokenizing money market funds.

A JPMorgan endorsement, a Merck supply chain deal, tier-one institutional custody via Copper.co, and $93 million in ETF inflows have all landed within weeks of each other — and HBAR's price has barely moved, holding near $0.083 in a range that has persisted since late May.

Why Price and Fundamentals Are Diverging

In mid-June, HBAR's open interest on derivatives exchanges surged 40%, alongside a 98% spike in trading volume that pushed 24-hour figures above $513 million, according to CoinGlass data. When a token's derivatives market is this active relative to spot, price responds to liquidation cascades rather than news — the structural reason positive catalysts haven't translated into sustained gains.

Canary Capital's ETF, with over $93 million in net inflows and only one outflow day, provides a floor but isn't large enough alone to absorb leverage-driven volatility. An upcoming unlock of roughly 3.97 billion HBAR is adding near-term pressure, with OTC desk activity suggesting large holders are positioning ahead of it. Until the unlock clears or spot buying accelerates, short-sellers retain the structural advantage.

The Chart

Since peaking near $0.12 in late 2025, HBAR has moved lower through a descending channel, with all three major moving averages sitting above price and sloping downward. Support at $0.078 has held twice in recent weeks. A confirmed daily close above $0.095 would open a path toward $0.102 and eventually $0.13. RSI sits at 47.27 — neutral-to-weak territory.

What the Merck Deal and JPMorgan Endorsement Actually Mean

On 9 June, The Hashgraph Group formalized a partnership with Merck & Co., connecting the pharmaceutical company's M-Trust authentication technology with TrackTrace, a decentralized product passport system on Hedera. Every batch in Merck's global supply chain receives an immutable cryptographic identity via the Hedera Consensus Service. The mechanism making this viable is fee predictability — Hedera's transaction costs are pegged in dollar terms, starting at fractions of a cent, letting Merck log millions of entries at fixed, forecastable cost. In pharmaceutical logistics, where US and EU regulators are tightening traceability rules, that predictability is the difference between a system that scales compliantly and one that doesn't.

Separately, a JPMorgan Asset Management report identified Hedera as the optimal public-permissioned DLT framework for tokenizing money market funds — a sector representing trillions in institutional capital. The bank cited three attributes: consensus security architecture, an energy footprint of 0.00025 kWh per transaction versus Ethereum's 2.95 kWh, and the fixed-fee model enabling predictable large-scale settlement. This kind of assessment from an institution with direct financial interest in the decision moves Hedera into a category where corporate treasuries evaluate it alongside traditional financial infrastructure rather than other layer-1 tokens.

Enterprise Scale, By the Numbers

Hedera has processed over 71 billion transactions since mainnet, settled more than $10 billion in real-world assets, and grown active wallets 140% year-over-year — none of which has translated into upward price pressure, for the reasons outlined above.

Infrastructure Changes Worth Noting

Hedera is overhauling historical data storage, moving from external cloud providers like AWS to dedicated Block Nodes, cutting confirmation times to under a second and removing an external dependency that had complicated regulatory certification for enterprises — a meaningful detail for industries like pharma and finance, where compliance requires a self-contained, independently verifiable audit trail.

On the AI side, the Hedera Agent Kit V4 allows AI agents to execute on-chain transactions within hard-coded guardrails — hourly spending caps, whitelisted destinations, and immutable audit trails of decision logic. This addresses a real barrier to enterprise AI deployment in regulated industries: enabling autonomous transactions without losing the audit trail compliance teams require. Hedera's payment schemas were also accepted into the x402 protocol standard, enabling native HBAR and USDC micropayments for machine-to-machine transactions.

On 12 June, Copper.co integrated Hedera into its institutional custody platform, removing a significant compliance barrier for corporate treasuries. In Asia, Hedera cleared Japan's FSA process and secured a listing on OKCoin Japan with a direct yen pair.

Where the Critics Have a Point

Two structural criticisms remain unresolved. First, despite 71 billion transactions, most volume comes from enterprise data logging rather than the retail DeFi activity that drives speculative engagement on networks like Solana or Ethereum. Second, while anyone can hold HBAR, only Governing Council members — including Google, IBM, Boeing, FedEx, Accenture, Nvidia, and McLaren Racing — validate transactions at the consensus layer. Hedera is phasing in public node validation, but the network remains permissioned at its core, ruling it out for anyone prioritizing decentralization above all else.

The long-term bull case, with price targets toward $1.00 extending into 2026–2030, depends on enterprise pilots converting into sustained mainnet production use. That transition has no fixed timeline. In the near term, price will hinge on whether the 3.97 billion token unlock breaks the $0.078 floor, and whether the accumulated institutional developments are enough to force a clean break above $0.095.