Just writing here to wish you all a merry Christmas, a jolly time with your families wherever you are and loads of presents under your trees! Get comfy 'round your fireplace and sip on that cup of steaming hot chocolate.

Hive's been through a lot

The birth of this chain came about as a necessity rather than a desire to exact a vision. Though I wasn't around when we forked away from STEEM, reading up on what led up to the fork just made me all the more appreciate what Hive really stands for.

We are the distillation of a passionate people. I'd be willing to go as far as to say that Hive is a congregation of truly inspiring developers and content creators, and I'm super glad to have been involved in this community, even if for just a short while. followers and money don't so much matter to us as the love of the craft does, and I'm grateful for having stumbled upon this small community years ago.

But we can't remain small forever

Especially with all the exciting developments surrounding smart contracts, HoloZing and INLEO's outreach. Our biggest breadwinner will, of course, be smart contracts bringing in developers from all walks of life. What we truly need in order for our marketing efforts to be effective is a reason for anyone to use HIVE. An application to leverage the speed of our chain, a game like Splinterlands to bring in the NFT trade, a lottery for the gambling degenerates and many more venues to increase the value of Hive.

And as taskmaster says, the markets will align with the value. It always does.

And all it takes to bring about a total revolution on our blockchain is developers. Deathwing, Blocktrades, howo and the rest of the witnesses are doing a great job maintaining the blockchain, but they can only shoulder so much of the burden.

It's no easy feat

In truth, choosing to develop an entire framework (referring to the Hive Application Framework) through which many new-coming developers would most likely be unfamiliar with is a bold move on Hive's side. Many blockchains that were in a similar position to us would've chosen to achieve EVM-compatibility, which makes sense since Ethereum is full of developers.

I remember the time when Polygon was first introduced to the market as an EVM-compatible chain with the promise of sane transaction fees. It almost instantly blew up in price just as Ethereum's mainnet fees were starting to go crazy as developers and users alike were looking for a proper sidechain to transact in. Polygon filled that need on L2 and here we are.

What I'm essentially saying is that we will be waiting for a long time till developers outside of out landscape see the value in our chain. EVM-compatibility would've given us a great head start with a million developers to attract out there, but as it stands it looks like we are about to butt heads with Crypto's number two.

Still though, I'm genuinely excited for what VSCs have in store for us. It'd be quite incredible to see what dApps developers will come up with once its done. Automation via smart contracts is probably gonna be the biggest use case, and if Factorio taught me anything about automation, its that its freaking fun and convenient as hell.

Conclusion

So yeah, breaking the silence after being inactive for a long while. I'm about to wrap up the College phase of my life pretty soon. Happy holidays and stay safe out there, thank you for reading!