_{Hive Birthday Cake, baked by @Crimsonclad}

It's been another amazing year at Hive. There is more innovation on Hive than can be related in a single post or list. What we have seen within the ecosystem is simply phenomenal and can only be described as true Web3 excellence.

Forging Web3

Hive continues to lead in Web3 innovation. Hive's transformative community-driven approach has been heralded as the epitome of Web3 worldwide. Our community members have had the opportunity to inspire and educate others on the merits of Web3, sharing their passion for decentralization, autonomy and digital freedom with audiences of all ages.

Splinterlands continues to be the driving force behind P2E and Web3 gaming in general on Hive and beyond. The much-awaited Secret of Praetoria land expansion has finally launched their White Paper. Land Surveying starts in March and gameplay is spinning up in Q2. The beta edition of Soulkeep, a tower defense game, is coming out this coming week. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Other games on Hive are making steadfast progress. The FPS Cryptoshots launched complete with NFT integrations and are working on PVP and Hive lands. PsyberX also released a demo and created a preliminary marketplace for their NFTs.

Liketu is pushing ahead for mobile users. @Elmerlin writes:

"The past year has been focused on refinement and building a better mobile experience. We connected with people at Hive Fest and gave them an opportunity to view and try the mobile experience, got their feedback and are nearly ready to launch.

With the mobile experience, we've also taken onboard innovations from other Hive applications and built our own version of a true microblog called "Moments" - these, like threads will sit outside of your main blog posts and will allow for quick, bitesized posts which will synergise with your bigger main posts."

LeoThreads, polls, and filtering are just some of the things from the LeoFinance team. These combine the familiarity of Web2 with the autonomy and freedom of Web3 and add to their existing 'LeoVerse'.

Content promotion is also taking center stage. The Hive-Tube project hit v7.15 with added support for more auto-import sources and other improvements, introducing professional content creators to Hive. POSH, which incentivizes people to share Hive Web3 content on Web2 such as Twitter and Reddit, continues to support Hive community members. It hopes to keep promoting genuine activity and supporting original content.

Waivio also came out with a custom newsfeeds feature recently, allowing Hive members not only the ability to filter but to also share their custom filters with others.

Creating New Pathways

Hive has increasingly been adopted as the blockchain for students to become familiar with both blockchain technology and Web3. Hive is a safe gateway, it's a welcoming gateway, it's a realistic gateway. Here is a glimpse into the experience of the merger of Hive and education.

Muterra, which represented Hive at Engifest'23 in New Delhi, India, recently made onboarding a priority after identifying complications. Its newest release allows players to learn about Hive in-game while interacting with NPCs who take them through the process in the form of quests.

The impact of Hive has been able to reach far beyond the protocol.

@Bookerman of Hive game Wrestling Organization Online writes:

"Over the last year Wrestling Organization Online has held numerous successful sales with 10% of earnings going back to our wrestling partners. We are committed to giving back and leaving wrestling a better place than we found it. We would never have been able to have the positive impact we have had without the amazing Hive community. And that's the bottom line cause WOO says so."

DBuzz also joined the movement in educating the public through a partnership with Bitskwela (a leading crypto-currency educator in the Philippines) with the intent to make DBuzz a blockchain-based, flagship product of the Philippines. To learn more about Bitskwela you can view a segment about them on CNN Philippines, and enjoy coverage of their recent Web3 event in La Union, Philippines by Tony Rebamonte.

@HiveKings, the team behind HashKings and other blockchain-based games, is also focused on education. HiveDevsSchool, a free training platform for developers, HivePayments for commerce, and Dlearn, an online course marketplace, are all being built on Hive. They are also tackling onboarding, with a plugin for dapps and a launcher in the works.

Technological Excellence

Since the inception of Hive from the ashes of its predecessor, the underlying protocol and layered solutions have undergone tremendous optimization and expansion. The name of the game continues to be scalability to ensure that Hive is fast and efficient. Hive Hardfork 26, which took place in October, was titled 'Evolution' for a reason. It can be summarized in two words: speed and stability. Both of these underscore that Hive is built to last.

One Block Irreversibility or OBI was the main focus of HF26, allowing a block and its transactions to become confirmed within milliseconds of signing. This effectively reduced the time for irreversibility from 45 seconds to less than one. This makes Hive one of the fastest protocols out there and optimal for building on.

Recurrent transfers and transfer functionalities in general are underway by @Howo. Hivedex, a modern and light-weight exchange interface was built by @Mahdiyari, expanding the financial management tools on Hive even further.

A focus on ease of integration has been the overall trend among Hive layered solutions and tools as well. A much-awaited Ledger wallet integration in November concluded an already productive year with a bang. Since then, it has also been integrated with Hive Keychain in a much-awaited Version 2.4 update.

Peakd also continues to focus on utility. Text-to-speech, an encrypted chat, and HiveHub with its many features are just some of their achievements. Their statistical and financial management tools are cutting-edge to say the least. They are presently working on Peak Vault, a new Hive wallet.

@Freebeings' HAF Plug & Play is another development advent which enables anyone to work with custom Hive datasets and create APIs from them. It is based on the Hive Application Framework (HAF) and comes with two plugins to sync data for Podping and delegations as well as a Global Notification System and DEX.

Cross-Dapp Integrations

Over the course of the year we have seen much emphasis on cross-dapp integration between Hive dapps themselves. Actifit, Hive's longstanding fitness dapp, has recently announced integrations with both LeoFinance and 3Speak, while Veews and 3Speak have existing integrations with DBuzz through the use of a Buzz button.

Ecency likewise had quite a productive year. They introduced advanced trading, decks, integrated the SPK Network and also added Hive Engine token management, premium signups, among other achievements.

"Many innovations and new improvements making our products more stable and challenge status quo (Web2) applications, services. We are happy to be able to continue our service to our community."

~ @Good-karma, the founder of Ecency.

As for 3Speak itself, having released its mobile app and short form content system, 3Shorts, it continues to decentralise its back end video infrastructure by integrating the SPK Network and Acela Core. It now runs a fully decentralised encoder cluster, has integrated its novel, optimised IPFS garbage collection system and connected with Ecency, Actifit and Dbuzz dapps to integrate video upload and playback capability.

The SPK Network takes integration further. A variety of infrastructure is now operating P2P on the network from encoder nodes to DEX operators. Communities and content creators can now run their own Web3 enabled breakaway community platforms. Ceramic, off-chain light accounts now run on the SPK Network. DBuzz is the first dapp to integrate and trial this technology. Look for an incentivised P2P Storage testnet and P2P CDN infrastructure capability soon!

Hive Highlights

Two months ago we asked you to post your Hive Highlights. We saved your submissions until now to allow for more entries and today we gathered them all. There are many insightful and inspiring stories in these wide-ranging community posts. The holidays tend to bring out everyone's genuine thoughts and feelings. Seeing how enthused community members are with Hive is always an inspiration.

Trueliving43's experience
Idksamad78699's experience
Fieryfootprints's experience
Woelfchen's experience
Zagieluno's experience
Fermionico's experience
Roadtrip.prepper's experience
Chinito's experience
Hivecreatorsday's experience
Abdul01's experience
Joanstewart's experience
Blackdaisyft' experience
Merit.ahama's experience
Ikigaidesign's experience
Samgiset's experience
Anonymous02's experience
Davchi2's experience
Bombus' experience
Ijelady's experience
Lacochinaensalsa's experience
Pboulet's experience
Newnow497's experience
Funshee's experience
Soychalbed's experience
Hexagono6's experience
Ylaffittep's experience
Ibraimpvzla18's experience
Shahzad-ansari's experience
Neruel's experience
Nanixxx's experience
Audiarmisg's experience
Amberkashif's experience
Sofs-su's experience
Tengolotodo's experience
Wuildariablox's experience
Tahastories' experience
Graciadegenios' experience
Crrdlx's experience
Yenmendt's experience

What an incredible Hive anniversary so far!