Hedera Hashgraph’s HBAR token has surged over 15% after the U.S. Federal Reserve’s instant payments platform FedNow added “Dropp,” a Hedera-based micropayments platform, as a service provider.

Dropp is a pay-by-bank alternative to credit card payments which allows merchants to accept small-value purchases digitally without large transaction fees, according to FedNow’s press release. Dropp allows micropayments in Hedera’s HBAR, the U.S. dollar and Circle’s USDC.

Today’s action brings the move higher in HBAR to nearly 50% since mid-June and the token’s market cap to more than $2.1 billion.

Hedera Hashgraph describes itself as a uniquely structured blockchain compared to other chains due to its usage of hashgraph consensus. Hedera is the only public distributed ledger that uses this, according to the company, which notes that Hashgraph achieves 10,000+ transactions per second and low-latency finality in seconds.

According to a report by Messari, Hadera’s average daily active accounts have grown 288% year-to-date, jumping from 3,500 to 13,500 by Q2 2023. In terms of average daily creation of new accounts, there was a 340% surge over that same period, said Messari. The main driver behind the uptick in activity in Q2 was propelled by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), with the main driver of NFT activity being Karateka, a Web3 game built by GameOn leveraging the IP of Karate Combat. The report noted that last year’s activity was primarily driven by DeFi.

Hedera has seen a number of updates over the past few months, FreshSupplyCo (FSCO), a platform that tokenizes assets across the agrifood supply chain, integrated Hedera into its payment trigger API which was previously used on the discontinued private Mastercard Provenance blockchain. South Korean bank Shinhan Bank also recently completed a stablecoin remittance proof-of-concept pilot which was built on Hedera’s open-source public network.