Photo Credit: Phillip Pfeiffer
These are the first two articles I consumed early this morning:
In the first article, 
Among high-level, he mentioned smart contracts as an agenda for 2023. This leads me to visit blockctrade’s post. Of course, even though much of the content in that article evades me, I got the point that from a technical perspective, there are multitudes of developments going on that I assume most Hivians are not aware of.
Low-Level Developments
The second article is more of an expansion of the low-level developments taskmaster4450 identified in his first article. Here he talks about what’s going on in the “real” world, particularly in developing countries such as Cuba, Ghana, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
Reading what’s going on in Cumana City also made me excited. I am glad to see how HBD specifically works as a payment mechanism among several businesses in Venezuela. Such development is encouraging to see.
Also, the Hive Borehole project in Ghana is giving us a model of how Hive is starting to penetrate grassroots communities. How we wish that such an example will be duplicated in many places around developing countries. This shows that Hive in contrast to the many failed promises of the parasitical class is actually delivering real-world solutions to real-world problems.
Hive Analytics
Last night, I was exploring several new projects on Hive and I stumbled upon this interesting app, Hive Analytics developed by 
Unfortunately, the available data is only up to 2020. I wonder what happened in the last two years? If the numbers will be updated up to 2022, we will have a more complete picture of the increase in the number of Hive users' accounts per country.
Though incomplete, I got curious and decided to use the data to serve as my future reference. In addition to the four countries mentioned above, I want to include our country and the United States for comparison purposes. After completing the chart, I intend to make a few observations in relation to what taskmaster4450 classified as low-level developments, particularly in relation to the developing countries he mentioned.
Number of Users' Accounts Created per Country from 2016 to 2020
| Year | Cuba | Ghana | Nigeria | Philippines | United States | Venezuela |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | N/A | 5 | 18 | 44 | 1,357 | 74 |
| 2017 | N/A | 262 | 2,993 | 1,910 | 15,960 | 3,914 |
| 2018 | N/A | 308 | 5,570 | 3,157 | 14,299 | 13,014 |
| 2019 | N/A | 29 | 527 | 259 | 2,118 | 2,497 |
| 2020 | N/A | 6 | 83 | 47 | 244 | 204 |
Observations
Here are the obvious observations we can derive from the above chart:
Cuba is completely disconnected from the Hive network.
There is a drastic drop in the number of new accounts created beginning in 2019. I assume that was because of the Justin Sun crisis that happened back then.
2018 was the peak in terms of growth in the number of users' accounts creation.
Seeing the above data, I consider the Hive Borehole project as a breakthrough even with the small number of users in Ghana.
I am impressed with the data from the Philippines. I wish to connect with some Hivians here in our country.
The numbers from Venezuela are really great! No wonder, after several years, Hive has caught the attention of several entrepreneurs in the country.
As for the country that occupies the first place, nothing beats the United States.
As noted above, the chart is incomplete. I wonder where I can get the recent statistics that covered the last two years for us to have an overview of the general trend per country in terms of growth of the number of new accounts created.
Conclusion
Responding to the question taskmaster4450 raised, “Yes, I share your excitement about the many changes that are happening on Hive!”