During the September Technical Community Call, the team discussed:

•  Blockstreams, Blocknodes, and TSS: How they fit together, their purpose in the network, and the benefits they bring.

• Introducing AI Studio: build AI agents and applications that interact with them on Hedera.

• Hackathons update: What’s coming next for builders and how to get involved. 

With the December v0.68 release, Hedera will introduce Dynamic Address Book (HIP-1299) updates, allowing node account IDs to change over time. Node IDs stay fixed, but their associated account IDs, used for fees, rewards, and signing, may update.

Developers should upgrade to the latest SDKs and avoid hardcoding node account IDs, as outdated IDs will cause transaction failures. Most modern SDKs refresh the address book automatically, ensuring apps stay compatible with these network improvements.

In this 7th part of the REITs in Web3 series, Nadine Loepfe introduces Slices, programmable index funds for tokenized real estate. A slice bundles multiple yield-bearing property tokens into one index token, giving investors diversified exposure that auto-rebalances and compounds. With no fund managers, full transparency, and continuous yield, slices turn real estate portfolios into autonomous, self-managing investments.

One year after Hedera contributed its full codebase to the Linux Foundation for Decentralized Trust (LFDT), Hiero has grown into a mature, community-led open-source project — and now officially graduated, earning LFDT’s highest recognition for governance, adoption, and sustainability.

HIP-1261 proposes a clear, predictable fee model for Hedera: every transaction is “base fee + extras” (bytes, signatures, keys, gas, etc.), split into node, network, and service components. Fees are defined once in a deterministic JSON schedule (in USD tinycents) that tools and mirror nodes can reproduce exactly. The HIP standardizes how unreadable, invalid, unhandled, and bad transactions are charged, and supports congestion pricing.

HIP-1215 introduces the ability for smart contracts to schedule future on-chain actions directly through the Hedera Schedule Service. Essentially enabling fully automated “cron jobs” on Hedera. This means contracts can now trigger recurring events like DeFi rebalances, token vesting unlocks, or DAO maintenance without relying on off-chain bots.

HIP-1200 proposes replacing Hiero’s current RSA-based block signing with hinTS, a modern threshold signature system (TSS) based on BLS cryptography. Unlike today’s scheme, which grows in size and cost with every added node, hinTS provides constant-size signatures that verify in constant time, making validation fast, lightweight, and EVM-compatible.

HIP-1028 extends the Hedera Smart Contract Service (HSCS) to support token metadata creation and updates directly from smart contracts. Previously, metadata fields and metadata keys introduced in HIP-646, HIP-657, and HIP-765 were only available through HAPI calls.

This proposal adds these features to the Hedera Token Service (HTS) system contract, allowing developers to create, update, and retrieve metadata for fungible and non-fungible tokens entirely on-chain. It also introduces a new metadata key, enabling contracts or authorized accounts to modify token or NFT metadata after creation.