Hello my fellow hive community members!
I wanted to write a quick post today to announce a new tool implementation that I created as well as a few updates I have been working on that I will soon roll out to the beempy library.
Also my newer witness is still growing, but I need your help! Please consider voting for the sicarius witness here: https://vote.hive.uno/@sicarius
New tool for Hive
As many of you may know by now, I spend some of my free time outside of my full time job(s) as a hobbyist developer on hive. I had been mostly contributing to libraries for others to use to interact with Hive better and easier, but I noticed when I had first started as a witness that there weren't many different implementations of a witness price feed.
What is a witness price feed?
When the current witnesses are selected for signing blocks, the conversion rate of Hive/HBD is averaged from the published price feed of those witnesses. The witnesses can manually report the price via a transaction, setup a program to pull a price from another source and then publish it to their witness feed, or because it isn't required to enable a witness, just not have a price feed at all.
Why is the witness price feed important?
One of the biggest factors I consider when voting for a witness is whether or not they currently have a price feed, and how up to date that price feed is. If a witness has an old/stale/inaccurate price feed or therefore lacks one entirely, I have a hard time sending my votes their way. Why? Because it skews the effective price at which HBD is converted to Hive. Since the conversion price is the average of the reported witness price feeds, if the witness feeds are inaccurate, the conversion price for the end user will also be inaccurate. For that reason, it is important that witnesses are constantly updating their price feeds to the most up to date and accurate conversion rates.
Current tools available and my new tool!
Currently, the main used implementation of a price feed for witnesses has been hivefeed-js, written by 
I, however, am not as big of a fan of javascript and prefer python as a language. With that being the case, I decided to write a new (and I think a little easier/lighterweight) implementation of the witness price feed in python. This program pulls an aggregated Hive to HBD (pegged to usd) price from the coingecko api and pushes it to the intended witnesses price feed. You can find my pricefeed implementation here: https://github.com/sicarius97/hivefeed-py
I wrote this because I wanted to make it easier for witnesses to include a price feed with their witness, as it is quite important for the stability of the Hive chain. I also wanted to provide an alternative for those who were more comfortable with different programming languages, like python. Clone it, fork it, improve it, how you use it is up to you!
Beempy updates
I don't want to make this post too long and boring (haha), but I also wanted to mention a couple of beempy, the main python library for Hive, updates that I have been working on. Most of these concern the rollout of the next hardfork, HF25, which will be coming soon. I am adding support for the new functions added in HF25 such as recurring transfers, updating proposals, and instant collateralized HBD to Hive conversion! For anyone using the beempy library, I hope this is great news and it will add some awesome extended functionality.
Thank you!
Thanks in advance for giving this a read and for all of those who support the sicarius witness and follow me on Hive! If you haven't yet and have some extra witness votes, please consider supporting projects like the ones mentioned in this article and more by voting for the 
You can vote at https://vote.hive.uno/@sicarius
Have a wonderful day and if anyone ever has any questions or wants to say hi, don't hesitate to comment or reach out!
Best regards,
Sicarius