Ecosystem

What Hieco Is

Hieco is a TypeScript-first toolkit for building apps on Hedera without stitching the whole stack together by hand. It brings wallet connection, signer-aware flows, Mirror Node reads, realtime subscriptions, CLI tooling, and framework bindings into one package family.

In practice, that means Hieco sits closer to application code than raw ledger infrastructure. You use it when you want to ship a product, not when you want to think about every lower-level moving part yourself.

What the Hedera Network Is

The Hedera Network is the live public network where accounts, tokens, topics, smart contracts, and transactions actually exist. It is the runtime layer. When an app sends a transaction or reads public state, this is the network it ultimately depends on.

Around that live network are a few important access layers: SDKs for writing and signing transactions, Mirror Nodes for historical and indexed reads, and wallets for user-controlled signing. Most app development is really about getting these layers to work together cleanly.

What Hiero Is

Hiero is the open source distributed ledger software used to build Hedera, now hosted by LF Decentralized Trust. It includes the lower-level codebase, core services, tooling, and libraries that sit underneath the application layer.

If Hedera is the network you deploy to, Hiero is much closer to the foundation that makes that network and its tooling possible. That is why Hieco and Hiero are related but not the same thing: Hiero is infrastructure and core tooling, while Hieco is focused on developer ergonomics higher up the stack.

How the Pieces Fit Together

A simple mental model is: users connect through wallets, wallets produce signers, apps use SDKs and app frameworks to build transactions, and public data is often read through Mirror Nodes. Underneath all of that, the live network is Hedera, and the open source ledger foundation is Hiero.

Hieco lives in the middle of that flow. It does not replace Hedera or Hiero. It wraps the parts app teams touch every day so the experience feels closer to modern TypeScript development and less like wiring infrastructure by hand.

Other Parts Worth Knowing

Mirror Nodes are the read-heavy side of the ecosystem. They make it practical to inspect account history, token data, transactions, topics, and contracts without asking an app to hit consensus nodes directly.

Wallets such as HashPack give users control over keys and signatures. SDKs such as the Hiero SDK expose lower-level capabilities. Hieco sits on top of those layers to make app code more cohesive.

The Short Version

If you are building a product, the shortest useful summary is this: Hedera is the network, Hiero is the open source ledger and tooling foundation, and Hieco is the developer toolkit that helps turn those capabilities into app-ready building blocks.