As announced in April 2022, the Hedera Governing Council has entered into an agreement to outsource services previously performed by Hedera Hashgraph, LLC personnel to Swirlds Labs, as the Council focuses on network governance, industry standards, public policy, and treasury management.
The payments for these services will be made as prepayments of hbars, with periodic adjustments based on actual expenses and HBAR market price. The first of these prepayments will be made this month.
This prepayment will include 919,941,121 hbars and will be transferred from account 0.0.81 to account 0.0.56001, and Swirlds Labs has informed us that portions of that balance will then be further transferred to a number of accounts for security and risk management purposes.
The transferred hbars from this initial prepayment and future payments to Swirlds Labs for the outsourced services will be considered part of ‘released supply’, which many external parties include in their definition of ‘circulating supply’.