Hive Today — October 17th, 2020 — We’ve Eclipsed and Forked Hard

Hive is an open source and decentralized social platform with a blockchain at the core. It’s an open place where you can earn crypto for being social. It’s censorship-resistant and your keys control your content and your wallet.

Hive is home to a vibrant and growing community of developers, artists, content creators and more. At layer 0 is a remarkably strong community. Layer 1 is the Hive blockchain itself, with secure accounts and wallets. And Layer 2 is the applications (dApps) and services built on top of Hive network APIs. Hive’s network nodes and API nodes are run by volunteers from the community.

The technology powering Hive has been continuously in development since it came online more than four years ago. Today, the latest stable version of Hive is version 23, and version 24 is coming very soon. Here I am doing my part to share some of the exciting updates from the Hive ecosystem.

Hive Chain News

We forked! A highly anticipated update to the Hive blockchain and Hivemind API layer went live this week. While witness nodes were switching over, there was some unexpected turbulence. Blocks were generated and rejected by some of the nodes, but the chain recovered soon after. Some are calling this a “soft fork”, others a “baby chain”.

Despite all the testing leading up to fork day, Hivers ran into many issues with API nodes and dApps following the hard fork. Witnesses and developers jumped in right away to start squashing bugs and patching holes. PeakD and HiveKeychain both have options to easily switch between API nodes, which comes in handy for times like these.

Thanks everyone for your patience in dealing with the fork-related issues. The dozens of volunteers contributing to the Hive ecosystem work hard to provide a great experience and strive to continuously improve. @GuiltyParties described it well in this post.

It’s 50% technical and 50% communication/coordination. That’s the reality of a decentralized project. Many of these contributions are qualitative and their value cannot be measured by any means.
~@GuiltyParties

Hive-Powered Games

Hive is home to a growing number of blockchain games. Many of these games are free to play. All you need is a Hive wallet.

CryptoBrewMaster

The @CryptoBrewMaster team introduced some additional weekday quests this week, creating more opportunities for brewers to collect ingredients. They’ve also added a new brewing supply store where players can buy ingredients. [info]

Splinterlands

This week @Splinterlands rolled out some changes for incoming new players. Like we covered last week, players won’t have a Hive Wallet created until they buy a starter pack. This change has gone into affect. In addition a new tutorial experience has launched, aiming to help teach newbies how to play. [info]

Today, @Splinterlands shared some very exciting news around the upcoming Land Sale. The first Splinterlands Land Presale will begin on Saturday, November 7th, 2020 at 12:00 PM ET / 16:00 UTC. [info] Details on how the Land Expansion will work were also published. Land collectors will be able to mint cards for items and spells. In addition a new type of card called a “Totem” will be available as prizes in the coming land raffle. Lots of info to digest, I recommend reading the whole official post.

Hive-Powered dApps and Tribes

Hive powers a growing number of decentralized apps (dApps). Since they all live on the same chain, one Hive account can be used to access every app.

Hive-Engine

A community team is assembling to help make Hive-Engine, Hive’s Layer 2 hub, more decentralized and more versatile. A meeting was held on Friday @9pm eastern, in a new Discord server created for the working group. [info]

Following the hard fork, Hive-Engine went through a long outage. Since the fork didn’t go smoothly, a blockchain replay was required to make sure balances were correct. It’s fully operational now. [info].

LeoFinance

A lot of exciting has been building in recent months thanks to bridges between Hive and Ethereum. wHive, wLeo, and DEC all launched on Uniswap, creating opportunities for investors. Unfortunately some of that momentum was lost this week because of a security incident involving WLEO.

A bad actor was able to get into the system and mint WLEO tokens on demand. These bogus tokens were swapped for Eth, diluting the Uniswap liquidity pool. Fortunately, investors noticed right away and pulled out their funds. As soon as possible LeoFinance shut down the contract. [info]

Like mentioned here last week, LeoFinance has switched to a flat curation curve to encourage manual voting. Here’s an example of what this looks like: if your vote is worth 2 LEO, 1 LEO goes to the author, and you get 1 LEO back. [info]

Today a huge announcement was made. LeoInfra V1 has launched, enabling MetaMask sign ups and sign-ins. This is intended to make it super simple for Ethereum holders, who often have MetaMask set up already, to create a Hive account and start socializing in the LeoFinance community. They’ve also made it easy to withdraw LEO rewards as ETH to their ETH wallet. [info]

PeakD

PeakD managed to sneak in a few updates this week. @Arcange’s new API node has been added to the list of nodes in PeakD settings. This node is ‘hive-api.arcange.eu’. New verbiage has been added to this page to explain how things work, because it was been a common source of confusion. If you’re using HiveKeychain, whatever node you set there is used for writing transactions to the blockchain. PeakD settings apply for reading data and for PeakLock writes.

The recently added “Top Views” page saw some performance improvements, too. [info]

3Speak

The @ThreeSpeak team recently unveiled some major changes. I’m not sure how we missed this in the previous weeks. The domain name has changed to 3speak.co from 3speak.online. An achievement (gamification) system is in the works, along with a built-in Hive/HBD wallet. [info]

Hive Community Contests and Initiatives

Hivers love contests. Many communities run weekly or monthly contests to encourage content creation and engagement. A good place to find contests the “contest” tag. Good luck, have fun!

@theycallmedan’s #HowItStarted and #TwitterCensorship initiative. [info]
@adalger’s Amazing Nature community’s weekly contest. [info]
@DBuzz Mondays — round 17, It’s About Collaboration. 15 Hive Prize Pool [info]
@Splinterlands weekly “Share Your Battle” challenge — Scale Doctor [info]
@thesocalhive’s weekly “MyCalifornia” contest. [info]
@yourtop3’s monthly contest — October — Favorite Halloween Movies [info]

Raffles and Giveaways

@combination’s weekly Hive charity giveaway. Proceeds go to @papilloncharity, a registered not-for-profit. [info]

Upcoming Hive Community Events and Meetups

Twitter HiveChat hosted by the one and only @dexpartacus — October 20th, at 1200 UTC.
@Splinterlands DYGYCON virtual event — October 31st, 2020. [info]