Steemit INC devs released another version of the steem blockchain just a few hours ago, 0.20.5, after they previously released 0.20.4 just a few hours before that. The new version, however, doesn't require a full replay of the blockchain (at least not immediately). But it is a required version for all witnesses now, to address a few bugs.

The majority of top 20 witnesses were running the latest patched version, 0.20.5, at the moment of writing, whereas the rest of them were still struggling with replays of previous versions.

Replying the blockchain happens when there are deep consensus changes (like resetting the RC values for all the users) and it's a time consuming operation (lasting from 4 hours to 12-13 hours, depending on the witness hardware).

Both my main and backup nodes were updated to 0.20.5 and I'm waiting to produce my first block on this version. I also started replaying on the backup node, and will replay on the main node as well once the backup is up on running again.

Apparently, the most important cause for this upgrade is this:

Fix an issue which prevents newly created accounts from immediately receiving RC due to the account creation fee.

As the dust settles and these releases are less and less time consuming, the confusion goes down and the overall blockchain consumption starts to get back to more consistent levels, but we're still way down compared to where we were before HF 20.

The most important thing right now (at least in my opinion) is that exchanges are completely disconnected from the STEEM ecosystem for more than 2 weeks. No transfer has been made from STEEM accounts to any exchange during the last 14 days, which is a bit worrying. Partly because there's no external economical activity around the token, and partly because, although there is a lot of scarcity, the price doesn't go up, as we should expect, on the contrary. Seems like buyers aren't very eager to step in, at least for now.

One can only hope the latest patches will enable exchange nodes to become operational ASAP.

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me Hive account@dragosroua.

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