This change lowered the size of a fully populated HAF database by 700GB.

That is a lot and should make running a HAF node more affordable to people.

Work out schedule for creation of various HAF-based applications (most important one here will be a HAF-based smart contract processing engine).

Is this the announcement of the planning of something that might show up in a future announcement?

Tests for massive recurrent transfers to verify it according to relaxed rules to be added at HF28

Speaking of the next hard fork, the fact that it seems the SEC is looking to ban staking on exchanges, it provides an opportunity for Hive to expand the fixed income market. Perhaps having time vaults added in the next HF is a good idea. Get people to lock up their HBD for extended period of times to enable the creation of bond-type systems on layer 2 while also providing more fixed income options on the base layer.