How is Hive doing from a witness standpoint? This report looks at the voting support behind the current Top 21, October witness-vote activity, voting concentration, missed blocks, software version readiness, HBD interest-rate settings and price-feed quality.
Here we will be looking at:
- Number of votes received / removed per witness
- Hive Power HP, received / removed per witness
- Witness ranking and change through the month
- Missed block per witness
- HBD interest rate change per witness
- Price feed
- Software version updates
- Witness vote concentration
As mentioned, the data will be for October 2026.
Witness Vote Actions
Who gained the most number of new votes, and who lost votes? Here is the chart.
There were 1,012 new approvals in October and 349 removals across all 145 witnesses with vote activity, coming from 252 voter accounts. Compared with September, approvals rose by 244 while removals rose by 85, and total actions increased from 1,032 to 1,361. The mix remained weighted toward additions as overall transaction activity picked up.
@gtg ranks first with 75 total actions and a net gain of 41. @stoodkev follows with 69 actions and a net gain of 47, while @ocd-witness and @steempeak recorded net gains of 36 and 33. @emrebeyler was the largest removal-heavy name across the full activity set, with three additions and twenty-six removals, since his node went inactive. New and removed actions show participation, but not the exact HP change at transaction time.
Witness Hive Power Changes
Individual votes do show the overall support, but what really counts in a stake-based system is the amount of HP each witness has gained / lost. Here is the chart for the last month.
Across the full monthly activity set, new approval operations represented approximately 37.8M effective HP, while removal operations represented 102.5M HP. Both gross flows were higher than September, when the comparable estimates were 27M and 32M HP, and the October balance was approximately -64.68M HP. So more actions in the positive, but more stake in the negative.
@c0ff33a had the largest positive difference at approximately +6.6M HP, followed by @liketu at +6.5M HP and @stresskiller at +6.47M HP. @emrebeyler had the largest negative difference at approximately -24M HP, followed by @louis.witness at -7M HP and @therealwolf at -6.57M HP. These larger removal weights explain why the aggregate HP flow was negative despite the higher count of new approvals.
Witness Ranking
With the actions above, new support gained and lost, here is the current situation about witness rank and support.
The current ranking is led by @gtg with 103.5M HP in witness support, followed by @ocd-witness with 103.4M HP. Both remain above 100M HP, while ranks 3 through 8 range from 92M to 99M HP. At the lower end, @howo holds rank 20 with 74.7M HP and @engrave is rank 21 with 73M HP.
The gap between ranks 20 and 21 is 1.6M HP, down from 5M in the September report, while the full gap between ranks 1 and 21 is 30.4M HP. The number on each bar also shows the current count of witness approvals. It should not be confused with voting weight: one large account can contribute more HP than many small accounts.
Compared with the October snapshot @engrave entered the top 21, replacing @emrebeyler. @yabapmatt moved up two places to rank 6, while @roelandp gained one to rank 5. @arcange fell three places to rank 8 and @therealwolf four to rank 18. @threespeak moved up to rank 11, while @themarkymark slipped to rank 12. @abit, @pharesim, @deathwing, @mahdiyari, @smooth.witness and @howo each gained one place. The other eight positions were unchanged.
Biggest Governance Movers
Which accounts had the most stake behind their October witness-vote changes? The chart below screens every account that added or removed at least one witness approval during October, then ranks the 20 largest by effective HP. The bars measure current account voting weight, while the labels show how many approvals the account added and removed.
The 20 accounts represented approximately 25M effective HP, above the 7M tracked in September. @gtg ranked first at 6.5M HP and added four approvals while removing ten. @smooth followed at 5.5M HP with one removal, while @oflyhigh, at 4M HP, removed two approvals. @theycallmedan and @azircon each removed one approval, backed by 1.6M and 1.2M HP respectively. These large accounts made more removals than additions, helping explain the negative aggregate weight balance.
Missed Blocks and Witness Reliability
Hive scheduled 892,800 three-second slots during October. The chain produced 889,274 blocks and recorded 3,526 producer-missed operations, giving an overall completion rate of approximately 99.605%. This was an improvement from September, when 4,258 slots were missed and completion was approximately 99.507%. The decrease of 732 missed slots equals a month-over-month improvement of about 17%, even though total scheduled capacity was one day higher.
The current Top 21 accounted for 469 of the network-wide misses, or 13%, down from 1,826 in the September report. @threespeak recorded 435 misses from 42,385 scheduled slots, the highest rate in the group at approximately 1.03%. The next-largest count was fourteen for @roelandp, so the current group's misses remained concentrated in one producer.
The two busiest disruption days were 18 October with 551 misses and 21 October with 116. Together they contributed 667 misses, or 19% of the monthly total. This was less concentrated than September, when 17 and 16 September generated 1,948 misses and 46% of that month's total. October still had one elevated day, but the two-day disruption was much smaller.
Witness HBD Interest-Rate Changes
HBD interest changes can be a hot topic. It sets the interest for HBD in savings. So, users will pay close attention to this.
Interest policy remained relatively steady in October. The median for the current Top 21 remained at 10% from the start to the end of the month. Two witnesses lowered their settings from 10% to 8%, 19 ended unchanged and none finished with a higher rate.
The changes came from @stoodkev and @guiltyparties, which both moved from 10% to 8%, reductions of two percentage points. Month-end settings for the current Top 21 ranged from 6% to 15%: @threespeak and @abit remained at 6%, while @engrave, newly in this ranking, held an unchanged 15% setting.
Price-Feed Freshness and Dispersion
The price feed is an essential parameter for the Hive chain, having in mind the dual currency system and the conversions between HBD and Hive. The top 21 witness are feeding the chain with outside prices, serving as oracles.
At the October month-end cutoff, three witnesses had published within 15 minutes, three were between 15 and 30 minutes old, nine were between 30 and 60 minutes old, and six were between one and 24 hours old. No current Top 21 feed was more than 24 hours old, unchanged from September. Fifteen of the 21 values were therefore less than one hour old at the cutoff, up from fourteen.
Witness Software-Version Readiness
At the start of November snapshot, eighteen witnesses were reporting node version 1.28.8 and three remained on 1.28.7: @steempeak, @arcange and @therealwolf. Most of the current Top 21 have moved to the newer observed version.
Witness Vote Concentration
Voting concentration was mixed. The largest direct-voting entity, including stake routed to it through proxies, controls approximately 25% of the effective witness-voting stake measured here. The top 5 account for 42%, the top 10 for 50%, the top 20 for 60% and the top 50 for 70%, with mixed changes from the September snapshot. The Top 10 measure fell by roughly 0.6 percentage points month over month.
The largest entity in the snapshot remains @blocktrades, with approximately 33M effective HP when its own stake and proxied voting stake are combined. The calculation identified 4,617 direct-voting entities across 59,857 current account-witness vote links. Influence broadens after the largest few entities, but passing 50% within the top 10 still means a relatively small set of decision paths can affect the whole witness ranking.
All the best @dalz
