Splinterlands' Plans for the Upcoming Hive Fork

For those who may not be aware, a group of Steem developers, stakeholders, and community members are creating a fork of the Steem blockchain called "Hive" which is scheduled to launch this Friday, March 20th, 2020. You can read more about the details of that here and here.

Many of our players have been expressing concern over how that might affect the game and the cards and wondering if we are planning to move the game to the Hive fork. We would like to take this opportunity to answer questions and address concerns to the best of our ability.

First and foremost, we want to be clear that when the Hive fork is scheduled to go live on Friday, Splinterlands will continue to operate as normal using the original Steem blockchain as the base layer as it always has. Splinterlands cards and other assets (DEC tokens, packs, etc) will not be forked as they "live" on a second-layer platform which is separate from the base chain and which is not forking.

Should there be any unforeseen issues or complications arising from the fork, we will address them as necessary, but we do not anticipate any problems at this time.

The Splinterlands team values the ideals and benefits of decentralization very highly, as we expect many of our players do as well, so we will be watching the development and progress of the Hive blockchain very closely and doing what we can to support it and to support our players that choose to use it for posting Splinterlands-related content.

We intend to cross-post all messages to both Steem and Hive on the @splinterlands and @steemmonsters accounts and we plan to use our airdropped HIVE stake to manually curate content on Hive just like we are currently doing on Steem. Additionally, we plan to allow HIVE tokens to be used to make purchases within the game along with the existing list of payment options as soon as it establishes reliable and reasonably stable market pricing.

When new players sign up for the game after the date of the fork, we plan to create their account on both the Steem and Hive blockchains so that they will be able to use and interact on both chains outside of the game using the same account name and keys. If a user chooses to change their keys, then it will be their responsibility to make sure they change them on both platforms, and Splinterlands will provide account recovery services on both platforms as well for any accounts that we have created.

The most common question being asked is whether or not we will be "moving" the game to the Hive blockchain - which would mean that all game transactions would be posted to the Hive blockchain instead of to the Steem blockchain as they are currently. This is something that we will be looking into but not something that we can commit to one way or the other at this time.

After the Hive blockchain launches (forks from Steem) we intend to set up a test site for the game that uses the Hive blockchain in order to ensure that everything would work properly and smoothly in the event that a decision is made to move there. We need to ensure that Hive will be operating reliably and have all of the tools and services that we need to support the game and that players rely on, which we expect may take some time.

Additionally, Splinterlands will not move to Hive unless we can ensure that the transition is completely seamless to our players. It should be akin to a switch to a different back-end database for the game and players should not need to prepare or take any special action as a result. Ideally players need not even be aware that it is happening.

Ultimately any decisions like this will come down to what is in the best interest of the Splinterlands playerbase (which includes a large and growing number of people from outside of the Steem ecosystem) and will include discussion and feedback from the players and stakeholders.

Lastly, we know that these are difficult times not just for the Steem blockchain, but also for the world at large, and we hope that everyone stays safe and we will be doing whatever we can to weather the storm and hopefully come out of this much better off and maybe, one day, reach that moon!