Hello Hivers, I'm the CEO of OpenOrchard where we are developing the Koinos^TM blockchain which we announced on Hive this past June. We've made a lot of progress since that time and will be making some pretty exciting announcements very soon. If you would like to receive up-to-date information about Koinos, join our email list by going to openorchard.io.

Our #1 priority with respect to the launch strategy of Koinos is maximizing accessibility. We want to make sure that those who are interested in being involved with Koinos are aware that important announcements will be coming soon which is why I worked with Cointelegraph to develop a series of articles in which I explore what we believe to be the major crises holding back blockchain adoption and which Koinos is being built to address. There will be two more articles published this week, so be sure to keep an eye out if this subject interests you. But in this post I wanted to discuss how Koinos relates to the stakeholders, end-users, and developers of Hive.

For those who don’t know, I was the Head of Communications at Steemit and my co-founders were the core development team behind Steem. Bear in mind that Hive is now maintained by a different team of developers and our focus has been entirely on Koinos for the past few months. So as I explore our views about Hive and the decisions we made back when it was Steem, just remember that these are own opinions and are not necessarily representative of the current Hive leadership or of Steemit, Inc.

Our Vision of Steem

What we saw ourselves doing with Steem was pushing the limits of what could be done with an application-specific blockchain. We considered it application-specific because smart contracts could not be added to the blockchain, which meant developers could not use the decentralized network to perform computations. Instead, it was a blockchain designed from the ground up to power a specific application; blogging.

The advantage of this was that the chain could operate very efficiently, which enabled us to keep the cost of running the network down and keep node operation relatively accessible (especially after developing Hivemind and MIRA). But most importantly, limiting the code running on Steem enabled the decentralized resource management system (Resource Credits) to deliver an extremely consistent user experience. In my opinion, the user experience on Hive is still unrivaled in the space and that's why.

Adding smart contracts to Steem would mean allowing any developer to run any kind of computation on the network that they wanted. Such contracts could consume a wide range of network resources which would make it harder for the resource management system to maintain a smooth user experience.

Once we had a fast and fee-less blockchain that effectively guaranteed a consistent user experience, this unlocked a ton of potential in what we referred to as "Soft Consensus" but would more accurately be described as interpreted or derived state as we explained here and which I expanded upon here.

While the "specific application" that Steem was originally intended to address was blogging, it became my belief that through the creative use of custom JSON ops by third party developers, it was revealed that Steem's true focus should be derived state (soft consensus, second layer solutions, etc.).

The Current Vision for Hive

That's why it is very exciting to see Hive account@blocktrades taking this vision to the next level. I say all of this only to highlight that we are very much aligned with the current vision for Hive. It was always the goal of me and my teammates to see Steem truly decentralized which ultimately would mean giving up control over the blockchain to the community. The silver lining of all that unpleasantness surrounding our departure from Steemit was that it gave the community the chance to pick up the mantle and to do for Steem what we had frankly failed to do; decentralize it. It is great to see Hive thriving precisely because we are no longer actively involved. I knew you all could do it, and you did!

With the community at the helm of Hive, this created a very exciting opportunity for us to build something completely different. Not something that would compete with Hive, but something that would deliver unique value to the blockchain space. Our journey was filled with twists and turns, trials and tribulations (and 2-3 pivots), but ultimately ended in the development of a totally new blockchain architecture built from the ground up to solve the problems of upgradeability, vertical scalability, and governance that will allow us to deliver a general purpose mainnet capable of empowering everyone on Earth to own their digital selves^TM.

Hive's strength comes from the fact that it is intentionally limited. Those limitations enable it to deliver a consistent user experience that makes its second layer all the more useful to developers. I believe that if the Hive developers keep pushing this design philosophy forward, Hive will continue to grow and prosper. But there are still times when developers are looking for the flexibility of a general purpose blockchain and in our discussions with those developers they made it clear that they were not getting what they needed from existing general purpose blockchains like Ethereum and EOS.

Their requests effectively boiled down to the same 3 things. They wanted:

1. To be able to create an unlimited number of free accounts for their users
2. To enable their users to transact for free without having to part with their tokens
3. Genuine decentralization without sacrificing performance

When we started on this journey we weren't sure whether we would be able to deliver on these requests, but we are excited to say that what we have developed has significantly exceeded our own expectations. Far from competing with Hive, Koinos will give decentralized application developers a powerful new tool in their arsenal that will enable them to onboard more users, perform more fee-less transactions, and take advantage of smart contracts when necessary.

I look forward to telling you more about Koinos, so be sure to follow me on Hive and Twitter. To receive important updates about Koinos, join our mailing list by going to openorchard.io and stop on by our Discord server.