^{This year's delicious Hive Anniversary cake was made by @itzchemaya}.

Time flies and it's hard to believe that Hive is already celebrating its 4th anniversary. It feels like only yesterday the Hive community stood up for decentralization in the face of adversity and in front of the entire world. Hive continues to be a vibrant and growing ecosystem of bloggers, developers, creators, artists, investors and builders. We congratulate every one of you on another wonderful year of Hive.

https://x.com/hiveblocks/status/1770507376816198135?s=20

A Glimpse at Hive Gatherings

^{Hive: The New Internet, Ghana}

Hive has the confidence of people across the world and numerous businesses that choose to use it either as an alternative currency when they adopt HBD or to build new solutions on.

The Hive community remains one of the most social communities across the globe. We had two major gatherings of Hivers last year, one of course being the annual Hive Fest. It took place in Rosarito, Mexico in September and was an event like no other. The other followed it closely in its tracks and was the Hive Summit in Caracas, Venezuela. This saw the gathering of many of the community members who were unable to make it to Mexico due to travel obstacles.

There were also a number of meetups in different countries in Europe and Asia, including the BuzzParty Hamburg, Germany get-together which is coming up soon.

In 2024 so far a notable Hive-created conference took place in Ghana. The New Internet was held on March 9th and saw wide-spread attendance by the tech community, dignitaries and of course Hive members. This was a one-of-a-kind event that was the first for Hive in Ghana but definitely not the last.

^{The Hive Sucre group celebrating our anniversary today.}

Dapps and More

There have been a lot of very useful updates and innovative development by the Hive-based dapps. The number of dapps is always increasing as more people choose Hive to build on. In no specific order these dapps and their features include the following. This is by far not the complete list of dapps as Hive remains one of the most suitable blockchains for building on and connecting different technologies to.

It was a busy year for the TravelFeed team. The dapp was rebranded and launched on iOS while updating Google Play. They launched TravelFeed Hosting, making it possible to put a travel blog on one's own domain. Any Hive beneficiary fees have been removed. They also welcomed AI by developing TravelFeed AI and AI Blogger. Mapping is also now made easy with AI-powered Magic Maps. AI is meant to help optimize segments of travel blogging, not replace original content. As always, original content is key. For the readers, a helpful smart travel planner and chatbot is available.

DBuzz achieved a major milestone by open-sourcing its entire codebase. A key update includes MetaMask integration on lite.D.Buzz, allowing users to log in with MetaMask and create a Ceramic account for off-chain posts and comments while staying connected with the Hive community. In the words of @nathansenn: "Personally, I'm proud to have developed the SPK Proof of Access protocol for the SPK network, ensuring that storage nodes reliably store files."

HiveLive is a new set of projects of @bambukah, with TokenDistrib initiated in July. It was followed by the launch of HiveLive Universe and HiveStream in August and NetworkStatus in September. When he wasn't working on HiveLive he was busy on updating other projects. He says "I want to thank you so much, Hive community for your ideas, feedback, advice, and this awesome support about what I've done. I hope 2024 will be at least as good. See you soon on Hive!"

The Invennium gaming platform saw its start last year, with the new Genesis League Goals as its first game. It also created and launched Arcade Colony and Moon Karts (which now has an Alpha) and is working on more.

dCrops held three successful events last year: Easter, Halloween and Christmas, with the Easter event also marking the two year anniversary of dCrops. The implemented a cooking update and a player-controlled market where players can respectively cook their harvested items and buy and sell their produce. They also added CROP:HIVE LP positions to holding rewards and had the effect of CROP token value going up by 80%.

Terracore saw the addition of 2,600 players and launched its Beta, NFT Marketplace. It also came out with a UI refresh and added a quest and boss system. It's proud to have placed as one of the top 50 games listed on Dapp Radar.

DLUX has fully integrated SPK Network for off-chain file storage, relying on Hive Peers for 100% of users file storage and backup needs. All dApps on DLUX are now installable with dynamic service worker and manifest generation. Honeycomb, the layer 2 backbone of DLUX, has progressed to version 1.4, allowing the config file alone to have new API methods, Smart Contracts, and Virtual Operations. This allows communities to build token ecosystems with relative ease, while benefiting from continued updates to its core software.

Vimm saw an unprecedented attack in August that left them with a bill that was more than 15x their annual income. They came back online in December, and have seen an incredible outpouring of support from the community at large. "It's good to be back, and it's good to be streaming again!" They have hired another developer who has been hard at work building new functionality for the site, @chiren is building out our infrastructure, and @ddrfr33k is "doing my regular gig of being the face of the site. We believe 2024 will be the year of opportunity for Vimm!"

Splinterlands saw the release of their most ambitious card set to date, Rebellion, and the release of the first playable phase of their new expansion, The Secret of Praetoria. Both were much-awaited by their ever-growing player base.

EXODE deployed a new website, a new colonization client, teams/projects features, four new starter packs (36 new unique cards) and new tutorials (Hive onboarding and evacuation); all set to make the experience smoother. They added Stripe integration and added not only new planet features, but also a new game play mode called EXODE Factions and new currencies. They also released a playable demonstration of colonization loop, and a new usable Talent+ pack which creates unique power variations of cards.

Streaming sites that are powered by Hive-Tube are seeing the benefits of the Hive and Fediverse networks working together; over 28,000 unique views per video were logged on Vigilante TV alone. The Hive-Tube backend can now auto-syndicate and scrape off 20+ sites. Incentivized remote transcoding and remote storage was added to Hive-Tube in 2023 as well. It also includes full support for Magnetbank torrent magnet links which further decentralizes the viewer/listener experience.

Crypto Shots continues to see ongoing development. This past year they added a NFT Marketplace and multiple other optimizations. In their PVP version they integrated Hive for their 2nd and 3rd levels, added secret shortcuts, rooms and bridges and in-game loot. Their PVP game had its alpha launch with Hive and Hive Engine rewards, added more game modes, token support and more. They continue to hold regular tournaments.

Pinmapple had another fruitful year. Over 5k Hive community members pinned at least one post, with over 100k posts pinned in total. It continues to grow and one day hopes to include posts from every country in the world.

Earlier, Ecency team delivered Waves (short content form) within Decks and Video uploads into our both opensource website and mobile apps. Website restructuring and change of framework is underway, this year we gradually moving entire codebase into modern style and better maintained framework. Benefits we gain from these upgrades are simply great, faster page loads, better amp pages, offline pwa capabilities, better search engine indexing, above all beautiful and pleasing user experience. Imagehoster server got huge upgrades, we not only migrated to new hardware/servers but also made some changes into codebase that can handle refetching and saving images effectively. Many other services such as hivesigner, hivesearcher, hivexplorer got technical server upgrades as well which are essential backbone of Hive ecosystem.

2023 saw the introduction of many new features on Hive Keychain extensions and mobile Apps, most noticeably the Ledger integration and cross-layers swap. Very recently the Hive community was excited to receive the long-awaited release of the new UI/UX and the multisig integration. There is continuing work to make Keychain a multichain wallet.

Muterra not only continued to work on its Beta launch but its founder also took some time away from his busy schedule to put together the first ever Hive Hackathon in India. The event was further supported by three Hive mentors, @arcange, @mahdiyari and @good-karma and many more dedicated Hive developers who came out to judge and assist.

It's been a busy time for Wrestling Organization Online. From a tech standpoint, they released a public beta, along with several critical gameplay features including: a new NFT marketplace, a new frontend site, land, organization, and wrestler upgrades, Bookers Licenses, and fiat onboarding with WOObucks. They represented Hive at several in person events, such as WrestleCon (LA), RareEVO (Denver), and Breathe (Las Vegas). Finally, WOO signed several new real-life wrestling celebrity partners to the project.

^{The WOO team and some very special friends.}

As we look forward, we aim to see more integration across the board both when it comes to apps and tools and between our promotional activities and our dapps. We definitely hope for our dapps to step out of the box and formulate creative funding mechanisms to ensure their long-term success.

Layered Solutions

The Hive protocol sees regular improvements. The majority of the work was on the efficiency side, streamlining processes where possible and optimizing the overall scalability of Hive. The Hive Application Framework saw many points of development and improvement and is a continuing focal point.

Hivedex, a HIVE/HBD trading and annonymous account creator application was launched by @mahdiyari. He also launched a public Hive RPC node rpc.mahdiyari.info and hafsql.mahdiyari.info, a public HafSQL database on HAF. HafSQL runs within the HAF database, parsing data on all regular and virtual operations and their parameters. More can be found here: HafSQL | 2 and HafSQL API | 2. He is further developing the database and future improvements are expected.

The VSC Project has built and launched a high quality testnet with webassembly, code in any language smart contracts. They built free Lite accounts with direct access to smart contracts and Hive, with a proof of concept fully decentralized Bitcoin wrapping system soon to be in production. They proposed to the Hive core team for L1 changes to bring "massive multisigs" to the Hive Layer 1 to support VSC and other Level 2s alike. They are actively working on a sleek well designed frontend for VSC and finance on Hive as a whole.

Hive Highlights

Every year we ask community members to write all about their cherished memories from the year past. Here are this year's Hive Highlights looking back at 2023:

Crrdlx's Hive Highlight
Rosmiapure's Hive Highlight
Miguelbaez's Hive Highlight
Fermionico's Hive Highlight
Louis88's Hive Highlight
Steevc's Hive Highlight
Filoriologo's Hive Highlight
Allentaylor's Hive Highlight
Psyberkid's Hive Highlight
Deeanndmathew's Hive Highlight
Danielvehe's Hive Highlight
Collinz's Hive Highlight
Mcsamm's Hive Highlight
Soyunasantacruz's Hive Highlight
Ferbu's Hive Highlight
Abdul01's Hive Highlight
Imahfuzur's Hive Highlight
Yuliadi's Hive Highlight
Henrietta27's Hive Highlight
Jazclassic's Hive Highlight
Hexagono6's Hive Highlight
Karelysk89's Hive Highlight
Merit.ahama's Hive Highlight
Morenow's Hive Highlight
Samgiset's Hive Highlight
Desic's Hive Highlight
Josegrech's Hive Highlight
Happyphoenix's Hive Highlight
Dorytagil2022's Hive Highlight
Zullyscott's Hive Highlight
Aellly's Hive Highlight

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our Hive community members for taking the time to put their experiences into words. Your reflections are an inspiration as always.

^{Looking back at a great year.}

Once again, as we celebrate our 4th anniversary we are consistently inspired by our decentralized ecosystem and community members. We look forward to many more years together as we continue to pioneer Web3 as Hive.