Well, I can't believe how much we've done to get to this point, and am so freaking excited it's finally here! Hive-Engine is leveling up by rolling out our decentralized back end!

What's a Hive-Engine

Hive-Engine is a layer 2 smart contract platform built on top of the Hive blockchain.

What's a layer 2?

You use your keys to post to Hive, we have a separate node that reads the stuff you post via custom json and interprets it to make your Hive and Hive-Engine tokens turn into programmable money.

What's a smart contract?

A smart contract is a snippet of code that programs tokens to perform certain actions under specific conditions. You can essentially pre-sign your consent to participate in an action so long as those conditions are met.

What's happening now?

Hive-Engine is an open source project and run off of one node and others can verify the authenticity of the data. We're moving to a witness system with 7 main witnesses and backup witnesses where the network is reading off of many servers and ensuring they are operating in tandem while each independently verifying the data.

Who cares?

Lots of people don't necessary care about "decentralization" so much as the benefits. In this case it's impossible for a single server to get hacked or corrupted and suddenly alter balances... It makes it so that multiple servers are verifying the data simultaneously. It takes unilateral power away from Hive-Engine and places it into the hands of many servers running simultaneously by different people with different personal objectives.

So, what do people actually do?

On Feb 3 at 1am UTC we're going to undergo scheduled maintenance. The server will be down, we're upgrading to the latest code base and we're taking a snapshot so that it's super quick for others to get up to speed. We'll issue instructions on how to run a node and how to vote with your staked WORKERBEE to determine who the main witnesses are. Then we'll fire it up, give it a day or two to make sure it's all working as planned and then deploy the witness contract!

Will I see a difference?

Hopefully you'll see no difference with the possible exception of slightly better uptime and response time of the website which will have many options to pull from for data. Otherwise, it should just be an invisible backend change that should give a lot more trust to the platform.

I want to run a node and be a Hive-Engine witness. What should I do?

@eonwarped will put out a detailed instruction post before Feb 3. Follow those guidelines and start bugging people with WORKERBEE to consider voting for your witness.

Are these the same people as the Hive witnesses?

They might be? But it's a different set of witnesses that may or may not have overlap with the current witnesses.

What do these witnesses get paid?

There's 100k BEE that enters into the ecosystem every year that's distributed to the witnesses. It's enough to pay for the servers or get some free token creation out of it. Hive-Engine is still very inexpensive to run as a node under the right conditions. I think Reaz is making a post about those conditions soon.

What's up next?

Well, after the decentralized network goes up we have a bunch of people working on different things.

reaz- tribaldex.com, a new and improved front end focused on NFTs
PALnet team- dublup.io, coming soon, a predictive market (like auger) built on hive-engine.
Cryptomancer- Eth on Hive-Engine + erc20s on HE + HE tokens as wrapped ETH erc20s
donchate- uniswap pools on hive-engine
eonwarped- smart contract SMT development
bait002- hive-engine classic mobile app
lion200- dswap, adding vanilla crypto functionality

Others: bid market, DAO smart contract

I want to support development, how can I help?

If you're a coder you can code smart contracts. If you're not that's ok. If you have money you can buy BEE, WORKERBEE, or farmfarmer.farm/mythical.farm NFTs or vote our DAO proposal.

Wait what'd I read again?

Hive-Engine is getting a P2P network. Node upgrade on Feb 3rd. Live P2P and witness contract later that week.

Thanks for checking us out, and please celebrate with us and the new witnesses as we roll out Hive-Engine 2.0 on the layer 2!