How is Hive doing from a witness standpoint? This report looks at the voting support behind the current Top 21, September witness-vote activity, voting concentration, missed blocks, software version readiness, HBD interest-rate settings and price-feed quality. Monthly activity covers the complete UTC month.
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 concetration
As mentioned, the data will be for September 2026, with the current-state snapshot taken on 5 October.
Witness Vote Actions
Who gained the most number of new votes, and who lost votes? Here is the chart.
There were 768 new approvals in September and 264 removals across all 120 witnesses with vote activity, coming from 211 voter accounts. Compared with August, approvals fell by 266 while removals fell by 45, total actions eased from 1,343 to 1,032. The mix therefore remained weighted toward additions even though overall transaction activity was lower.
@stoodkev ranks first with 60 total actions and a net gain of 48, close to its August activity but with three fewer net approvals. @gtg follows with 45 actions and a net gain of 37, while @arcange and @ocd-witness recorded net gains of 30 and 25. @stayoutoftherz was the largest removal-heavy name across the full activity set, with one addition and twelve removals. 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 mount 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 27.18M effective HP, while removal operations represented 32.63M HP. Both gross flows were higher than August, when the comparable estimates were 22.04M and 25.64M HP, and the September balance was approximately -5.45M HP. That balance shows that a month with more approval transactions can still carry less stake than its removals. This is a snapshot-weighted flow measure, not an exact reconciliation of support.
@gwajnberg had the largest positive difference at approximately +1.73M HP, followed by @seattlea at +1.65M HP and @atexoras.witness at +1.56M HP. @deathwing had the largest negative difference at approximately -2.30M HP, followed by @stayoutoftherz at -1.89M HP and @town-hall at -1.81M HP. These larger removal weights explain why the aggregate HP flow was negative despite the strong 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 105M HP in witness support, followed by @ocd-witness with 104.8M HP. Both remain above 100M HP, while ranks 3 through 8 form a relatively tight band from 96M to 100M HP. At the lower end, @smooth.witness holds rank 20 with 81M HP and @howo is rank 21 with 76M HP.
The gap between ranks 20 and 21 is 5M HP, while the full gap between ranks 1 and 21 is 29M 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.
@blocktrades moved up three places to rank 3, while @stoodkev fell four to rank 7. @threespeak gained two places to rank 12, while @therealwolf fell two to rank 14. @steempeak, @roelandp, @abit and @pharesim each gained one place; @arcange moved down one and @deathwing two. The other eleven positions were unchanged, and no new witness entered the Top 21.
Biggest Governance Movers
Which accounts had the most stake behind their September witness-vote changes? The chart below screens every account that added or removed at least one witness approval during September, 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 6.89M effective HP, below the 9.90M tracked in August. @acidyo ranked first at 1.46M HP and added four approvals while removing two. @solominer followed at 1.39M HP with two additions and two removals, while @lazy-panda, at 0.88M HP, added six and removed sixteen approvals. @pouchon changed six choices with 0.52M HP, and @deanliu recorded one action backed by approximately 0.34M HP. The top three included a removal-heavy account, which also helps explain the negative aggregate weight balance.
Missed Blocks and Witness Reliability
Hive scheduled 864,000 three-second slots during September. The chain produced 859,742 blocks and recorded 4,258 producer-missed operations, giving an overall completion rate of approximately 99.507%. This was a deterioration from August, when 2,642 slots were missed and completion was approximately 99.704%. The increase of 1,616 missed slots equals a month-over-month deterioration of about 61%, while total scheduled capacity was one day lower.
The current Top 21 accounted for 1,826 of the network-wide misses, or 43%, up sharply from 170 in the August report. @threespeak recorded 1,821 misses from 40,736 scheduled slots, the highest rate in the group at approximately 4.5%. The next-largest count was only two for @roelandp, showing that the current group's misses were highly concentrated in one producer. @howo missed one of 2,795 scheduled slots as the rank 21 backup, a rate of approximately 0.036%.
The two busiest disruption days were 17 September with 1,090 misses and 16 September with 858. Together they contributed 1,948 misses, or 46% of the monthly total. That is much more concentrated than August, when 11 and 9 August generated 344 misses and 13.% of that month's total. September still had several elevated days, but the two-day shock was much larger.
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 September. The median for the current Top 21 remained at 10% from the start to the end of the month. One witness lowered its setting, nineteen ended unchanged and one finished the month with a higher rate. In comparison, one current Top 21 witness had lowered its setting during August as the median remained at 10%.
The changes came from @smooth.witness, which moved from 10% to 9%, a reduction of one percentage point, and @mahdiyari, which raised its setting from 10% to 12%. Month-end settings ranged from 6% to 12%: @threespeak and @abit remained at 6%, while @ocd-witness, @arcange and @blocktrades remained at 12%. This followed the single reduction recorded in August.
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 September month-end cutoff, three witnesses had published within 15 minutes, one was between 15 and 30 minutes old, ten were between 30 and 60 minutes old, and seven were between one and 24 hours old. No current Top 21 feed was more than 24 hours old, unchanged from August. Fourteen of the 21 values were therefore less than one hour old at the cutoff.
Witness Software-Version Readiness
At the 5 October snapshot, all 21 witnesses were reporting node version 1.28.7. This maintains the convergence visible in the August report, when all 21 were also on 1.28.7.
Witness Vote Concentration
Voting concentration was mixed. The largest direct-voting entity, including stake routed to it through proxies, controls approximately 24% of the effective witness-voting stake measured here. The Top 5 account for 42%, the Top 10 for 51%, the Top 20 for 60% and the Top 50 for 71%, with mixed changes from the August snapshot. The Top 10 measure fell by roughly 0.1 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 4,779 direct-voting entities across 61,441 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
