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Overview

The Hedera mainnet (short for main network) is where applications are run in production, with transaction fees paid in HBAR. Any application or retail user can submit transactions to the Hedera mainnet; they’re automatically consensus-timestamped and fairly ordered. Any Hedera account can query data associated with Hedera’s services and stored on-chain. Every transaction requires payment of a fee. Fees follow a base fee + extras model defined in the network’s fee schedule (system file 0.0.113). Fees are denominated in USD (as tinycents) and paid in HBAR at the current exchange rate (100,000,000 tℏ = 1 ℏ). You can learn more about transaction fees here and estimate your application costs using the fee tables or the POST /api/v1/network/fees Mirror Node endpoint. If you’re looking to test your application (or just experiment), please visit Testnet Access. The Hedera testnet enables developers to prototype and test applications in a simulated mainnet environment that uses test HBAR for paying transaction fees.
Transaction Throttles Transactions on the Hedera Mainnet are currently throttled. You will receive a "BUSY" response if the number of transactions submitted to the network exceeds the threshold value.

Main Network Throttles

High-Volume Throttles

In addition to the standard throttles above, the network provides dedicated high-volume throttle capacity for entity creation transactions that set high_volume = true. These throttles run in parallel — they do not consume capacity from the standard system, and the standard system does not consume capacity from them. A high-volume transaction must pass both its per-type bucket and the total bucket to be accepted. If either is exhausted, the transaction receives a BUSY response — the same behavior as the standard throttle system.
High-volume transactions use variable-rate pricing that scales with utilization. See the High-Volume Entity Creation guide to understand how this affects your transaction fees before opting in.