I'd like to introduce you to our Hive Engine witness, @sportswitness, and kindly ask for your vote in Hive Engine governance to support the SPORTS community on Hive.

A couple weeks ago @aggroed made the announcement that Hive-Engine had successfully upgraded to their P2P layer and that the witness contract would be starting shortly. Fast forward about a week and @patrickulrich decided it would be useful if SPORTS had a voice in this governance layer and launched this witness node to the network.

@patrickulrich then went to the SPORTS community and requested the community's backing to launch @sportswitness as a SPORTS project. This proposal successfully passed with 100% of voting SPORTS Governance Power as favorable to the adoption. As such this witness will be manged by @patrickulrich and run for the interests of the SPORTS community.

About SPORTS

SPORTS was launched early in the days of Steem Engine as a community to spur engagement and content related to sports and athletics. Since that time we've been one of the most active tribes on Hive focusing on a core consumer niche that attracts billions of users to the internet each day. Our new focus is now on bringing more of those outside consumers to our site and by relation Hive Engine.

The journey hasn't been easy for us as a community. Like other tribes that came to Hive Engine we had to make the decision that Hive and our community was more important than anything that could be found for us on Steem and make the move to a new blockchain. We're thankful to the Hive Engine team for making that transition as seamless as they could and were again one of the earliest tribes to move over.

We've been lucky to have a community that has continued to grow and support us along the way. We've also been fortunate enough to partner with other Hive Engine applications to reward even more users with our token while expanding our use of the Hive Engine network to new levels using features designed by other tribe networks. Overall we've enjoyed our experience on Hive Engine and are happy to have a voice in where the network will grow from here.

Our Node

Our node uses a Hive supporting company @privex. Privex.io provides traditional VPS and dedicated hosting for reasonable rates. More importantly they accept Hive as payment to make things all the better. Our server is running on one of their VPS systems with the following specs:

4 cores
2G RAM
35G SSD
Unmetered 100mbps Network
Ubuntu 20.04 (64-bit)
Hive-Engine node package v1.2.0
1000 Hive Power delegation for resource credits

I'd like to thank Privex.io for all they do to support the community and for providing a service where we can easily turn to. If you'd like to run your own Hive or Hive Engine witness or have any other hosting needs the link I shared above will give an affiliate share to our server and reduce the cost of running it. If you'd like to learn more about their services visit their Hive profile.

The node is being managed by @patrickulrich. I will be ensuring that updates are made to the node software and that node upgrades are considered by the community. If you need to reach me please ping my on chain account and I'll try to be in touch as soon as possible. The @sportswitness account's wallet is being managed by @sports-gov through the ARCHON governance system. The BEE tokens that @sportswitness earns for the witness will be managed through future proposals voted on by SPORTS stakeholders.

*Hive Power was leased on DLease to last for 2 months. A future proposal will seek the community's approval of the witness for a longer term.

How to Vote

Hive Engine selects witnesses by the amount of WORKERBEE stake that is voting for each user. WORKERBEE is the mining token for the Hive Engine economy and creates BEE tokens. If you'd like to support us there are a number of front ends that you can vote for a witness from. If you'd prefer to use Hivesigner then click this link to approve us.. If you prefer Hive Keychain then try one of these sites:

@dannychain's Votify

https://votify.now.sh/sportswitness

Simply type in your Hive username and then click your preferred signing method and approve the transaction.

Tribaldex

https://tribaldex.com/witnesses

Login to Trivaldex using Hive Keychain or SmartLock then revisit the witness page. Scroll down until you see the @sportswitness account and click the blue arrow to the right then sign the transaction. At the time of writing we're currently listed as number 23.

@primersion's HIVE Monitor

https://primersion.com/he-witnesses

Log in to the witness page using Hive Keychain. Scroll down until you see the @sportswitness account and click the blue arrow to the right. At the time of writing we're currently listed as number 22.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank the Hive Engine team, in addition to the wider community effort, for all the work done to make this a possibility. I'd also like to thank @bala41288 for the excellent guide that helped lead me on the path to getting this node up and running. Most important of all I'd like to thank the @sportstalksocial community for supporting this work through the SPORTS proposal system!