So we finally at the end of high-fest 2026 in Barcelona, Spain. I had a great time, although with a very few amount of people. This made the event a bit more cozy, more fluid as there was not that many people and we were able to communicate with basically on a single chair in a restaurant.
This might be the dog days of hive but hopefully not the last ones. The event was able to show what Hive could be and what Hive is missing as well in this new era of AI. AI by the way was one of the most present topics in the 101 ones that we had on all aspects of the event.
It was funny and a bit ironic that I was on a AI event before hifest and there is an upcoming AI event after hifest here in Barcelona. Hivefest was full of the talks of what can AI do for Hive and also what Hive. The agent fever have many developers talking about the future of art, music, posts, "soul", and philosophical nature of purpose.
But let's back down to the beginning the first day after the dinner and opening drinks that we had about high fest. It started early in the morning. Roland was able to put a really good show for the rest of us in a industrial but inspiring coworking space.
The conversation of the presentations where were mostly about Hive future. As far as a, what web 3 still has to offer and how can we may Hive more accessible to the rest of the world. On the next year, also with the funds of the DHS, marketing, and other source of money that were missed on the building of the next Hivefest.
The next talk was also about development but it was more of the core development of the blockchain. They talk about how the way the blockchain could be sped out by using some of the new implementations such as changing processes from python to the native SQL language.
Another topic was the common use of AI right now is becoming more about generating unit test and how much time is being spent on testing rather than writing the code. This has made the day-to-day work of development. Just change dramatically, although there are good side in the sense that ideas get coded instantly. The challenges are to have those ideas integrated into the core code of the chain in a secure fashion.
The next dog was given by Hive work bees which was a group from Poland and share a presentation they did previously at the Blockchain European Conference. They were able to promote a workshop on HAF and libraries like wax as well as PHP and Typescript code for integration with WordPress and WooComnerce into the HivePay application.
After the event there were some brakeout networking session which lasted a good amount of time. I was able to strike conversations with the rest of the Hiveans as well as guests that were lured as the chain culture event was cancelled but still people with interest on that came to Hivefest.
Day two of the event was on the Social Club, a building full of venues including a quite modern Co-working space. Fully equipped with different type of desks and workstations, private meeting rooms and mini auditorium.
We were able to have a workshop on HAF nodes optimization as it was showcased how events could be generated from small IoT devices like a ESP32 board and also a Raspberry Pi. There were also talk about an agentization of Hive and use on AI platforms such as N8N.