TSCCall20260714

Hiero Technical Steering Committee Meeting

TL;DR: The TSC agreed to hold an asynchronous vote on HIP-1068 (Sponsored Fees) rather than wait for the following week's call. Brandon Hargreaves's HIP-1500 (a periodic holding fee for HTS fungible tokens) drew extended smart-contract-versus-HTS debate and heads back for a legal-driven revision, and Hendrik Ebbers proposed a new Hiero Agentic Support Project for AI-agent tooling.

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Details

Organization: Hiero
Date: July 14, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM ET
Recording: https://zoom.us/rec/share/nFDg3nQnuGoygZCNvMmjas0_ipMT3gqSDYfcl5PK8ZPBNMqEoEBGyrjk5-aEpc-M.j9OxCmaqSSWCicB1

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TSC Attendees

• Alexander Popowycz
• Hendrik Ebbers
• Michael Kantor
• Richard Bair

Guests

• Angelina Ceppaluni
• Brandon Hargreaves
• Jesse Whiteside
• Jessica Gonzalez
• Keith Kowal
• Sophie Bulloch
• Ty Smith
• (Others in the call)

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Agenda

• Short overview of last TSC call
• Any Updates/Events from Communities or members
• Project Proposal: Hiero Agentic Support Project
• HIP-1068
• Preparation for upcoming TSC seat votes
• Hiero Enterprise Java: Project update
• Any other business (AOB)

Public Participation

As with every Hiero TSC meeting, this was a public meeting and anyone could attend.
Information about TSC and other Hiero meetings is available on the public calendar.

Code of Conduct

The meeting opened with the usual reminder that discussions are conducted under the Linux Foundation antitrust policy and code of conduct.

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Meeting Summary

• Meeting format: Hendrik Ebbers recapped the prior week's Hiero Community Day in Berlin, noting attendees from three continents (the US, Europe, and Africa) and pointing back to last call's overview of the HIP process for anyone who missed it.
• Community Day follow-up: Jessica Gonzalez thanked the community for Community Day, said a recap blog post covering all the presentations is in progress, and linked the Awesome Contributions repo where slides and recordings are being collected.
• Rare Evo: Jessica flagged the Rare Evo conference running July 28 through 31 in Las Vegas, including an LFDT open-governance presentation and a Hashgraph Online and GoDaddy panel with a second HOL presentation by Michael Kantor.
• Maintainer response-time blocker: Sophie Bulloch said several website-repo PRs and SDK and Discord questions are seeing slow responses because too few maintainers with those permissions share overlapping time zones or workplaces; Hendrik said he had already raised it internally at Hashgraph, expected feedback within the week, and asked whoever runs next week's call in his absence to give the topic space if it remains unresolved.
• Deferred agenda items: TSC seat-vote preparation and the Hiero Enterprise Java project update were on the agenda but not reached; Hendrik said they carry to a future call.

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Presentations

• Hiero Agentic Support Project
  Presented by Hendrik Ebbers: a proposed repository of skills, MCP servers, and agent metadata (an AI agent's knowledge of Hiero and Hedera, plus MCP access to testnet and the Hedera documentation), packaged so it installs as a plugin in tools like Claude Code, and currently living inside Hiero Hackers. Alexander Popowycz asked whether this meant separate repos per tooling area, similar to the SDK group's structure; Hendrik said no, the intent is one agent-independent repo with tool-specific packaging metadata layered on top. Michael Kantor added context on the broader ecosystem, noting that MCP servers, skill.md, and agents.md are converging into single bundled plugin packages elsewhere, citing HOL's own Codex plugin marketplace as a model. Hendrik said he would put the project to a vote at an upcoming TSC call.
• HIP-1500: Periodic Holding Fee for Hedera Token Service Fungible Tokens
  Presented by Brandon Hargreaves, for a real-world-asset tokenization platform his company is launching. He explained the need for an ongoing fee to cover storage, insurance, and other carrying costs (comparable to an ETF's management fee), and that legal counsel had ruled out a depreciating token, then flagged that a direct customer-to-company transfer of the fee could itself require money-transmitter licensing, pushing the design toward wiping a limited amount from the BitGo-held depository account instead. Ty Smith asked whether a smart-contract-based mint-and-burn approach with hard time and amount restraints had been investigated as thoroughly as the transfer approach in the current draft; Brandon said not yet. Jesse Whiteside explained that legal counsel favored the wipe approach because a transfer-based fee risked OFAC exposure once tokens reached third parties, such as decentralized-exchange holders, who could not be KYC'd, whereas a wipe moves no tokens between accounts at all. Alexander Popowycz asked whether Hedera's HTS custom fractional-fee schedule could be adapted as the holding fee instead of a periodic wipe; Brandon said the difference is that a royalty-style fee triggers on a transfer, while this fee needs to accrue on a time basis regardless of transfers. Keith Kowal pressed on why a smart-contract implementation could not work given similar regulatory constraints exist on other chains; Brandon said the platform expects meaningful scale from partners he could not yet name publicly. Richard Bair, working through the problem with Leemon Baird, Atul, and Jasper, laid out the tradeoffs between building the mechanism into HTS versus a smart contract: a contract can apply fees cheaply per transaction but cannot feasibly assess every holder's fee in one gas-bounded call, a problem Hedera's scheduled-contract-call feature solves by letting the contract reschedule itself until every holder is processed, and either path still needs a governance backstop (the TSC and Council for an HTS change, a token-holder vote for a self-upgrading contract) to control who can alter the fee logic. Richard also asked how the fee would apply to tokens sitting in a SaucerSwap liquidity pool, where the network sees the pool rather than the original holder as the owner, and whether the asset would be exchangeable outside Hedera; Brandon said the fee would still apply everywhere, with price adjusting accordingly and arbitrage available, and that the team plans native issuance on other networks such as Solana rather than bridging, to keep activity on Hedera. Jesse asked Richard whether a wipe carries the same network overhead as a transfer; Richard confirmed every operation, including a wipe, is a crypto transfer at the base layer with the same cost. Brandon said the HIP will be revised through an addendum rather than a resubmission since it remains in draft, and Ty asked to be pinged for another review once the legal-driven changes land.
• HIP-1068: Sponsored Fees
  Presented by Ty Smith. Ty explained that sponsored fees let a hollow account become usable immediately: a sponsor grants an allowance, denominated in HBAR or a fixed USD amount recalculated at each transaction's HBAR-to-USD rate, for a given scope such as transaction fees, so a new user's very first transaction can be paid by someone else with no HBAR of their own and no separate funding step; the existing allowance mechanism is unchanged, but the transaction is now written from the user's own account naming its sponsor and scope, rather than the sponsor writing an approved transfer. Ty said he hopes to extend the same primitive to gas fees for smart-contract execution later. Hendrik complimented the presentation. Ty asked whether a vote could happen that day; given Hendrik's absence the following week and the resulting quorum risk, the TSC agreed to hold an asynchronous vote instead, with Jessica Gonzalez volunteering to open it.

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Key Decisions

• Hiero Agentic Support Project: Proposed for a future TSC vote; no vote was taken during this meeting.
• HIP-1500: Presented for review; no vote was taken, and the HIP will be revised via addendum.
• HIP-1068: TSC agreed to hold an asynchronous vote, to be opened by Jessica Gonzalez, rather than voting at the following week's call.

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Prepared by: Brandon Davenport