Press Release: The New Hive Blockchain is Launching, Here’s Everything You Need to Know
On Friday, March 20th, a new blockchain called Hive will launch from a fork of the Steem chain’s core code, backed by a powerful community and a renewed spirit for decentralized development.
Hive is a passionate effort, created by a large group of Steem community members who have long looked to move towards true decentralization and help develop the code base. The years of distribution issues and reliance on a central entity for code and infrastructure has been at the heart of a revolution of sorts, and the new Hive blockchain is the culmination of meeting the challenge of returning to shared values of protecting and celebrating the vibrant community that has grown around the ecosystem.
Since inception, the Steem blockchain has been under de facto control of Steemit Inc, which launched the chain in March 2016. The company held a majority stake in STEEM through ninja-mined assets established initially as a development fund for the Steem blockchain, which has been a contentious part of Steem’s history, governance, and distribution for the better part of four years since.
At 14:00 UTC on Friday, block producers (called witnesses on the Steem blockchain) who want to participate in the new chain will upgrade their software, and the Hive blockchain will be created as a new fork away from the current chain ID. All current Steem blockchain users will automatically exist on Hive, and a mirror of current balances will be airdropped in the new HIVE token at the time of the snapshot and launch. The Steemit Inc accounts, along with accounts pushing for support of the recent governance attack, will exist on the network exactly as before, but will not be eligible for the airdrop.
All of the existing user content from Steem will be ported forwards to Hive as historical data, but from launch onward the two chains will be completely separate, with future posts and transfers only on the parent blockchain. There are no special procedures for claiming the Hive airdrop, and all existing Steem users will be able to access the Hive blockchain with their existing login information to get started. A majority of the ecosystem’s existing apps, alongside new projects and interfaces, are preparing to operate on the Hive network.
One of the most important and exciting features of the Hive blockchain is the trustless “Decentralized Hive Fund” (DHF) development model which allows community management for a portion of the airdrop earmarked as development funds. To maintain the overall supply of Hive at the same level as Steem for launch, a portion of HIVE tokens will be airdropped to the Hive dev fund to create a robust resource pool for decentralized development. These funds will not be usable during the launch period until a future Hive hardfork upgrade is deployed to continuously liquefy the tokens over time to prevent market flooding.
This community fork and the creation of the Hive blockchain itself has been organized by more than 30 community developers, over 80 talented contributors, and the numbers are growing quickly. The open source codebase will be implemented by many current Steem witnesses who are choosing to leave in pursuit of an ecosystem that truly values decentralization and an opportunity to be a more dynamic part of the future roadmap. The coordination, effort, and passion behind this fork has been a widely talked about topic in crypto news, and marks a step forward for DPoS.
Investors of the Hive chain will be able to initially purchase tokens from Ionomy (https://ionomy.com/), Probit (https://www.probit.com/), and BlockTrades (https://blocktrades.us/trade) while Hive tokens are under review for listing at other exchanges. A growing number of exchanges including Bittrex, Huobi, Binance, BitThumb, GOPAX, UpBit, and WazirX (more close to finalizing at press time) have committed to supporting the airdrop and have published their intention to work with Hive.
Users of the Hive blockchain will be able to take advantage of three-second block times, free transactions, scalability, personalized names for accounts/wallets, escrow capabilities, and a rewards system for social media, gaming, and publishing use cases. Developers are welcome to join in the buzz and submit code for review and implementation, or to build their applications to run on the Hive blockchain. Through the Hive DHF, all users may submit a variety of proposals for funding, such as for development, business, or marketing, and take part in voting for fund management, governance, reward distribution, and block production when staking funds.
