HiveFest 2026 & EBC - September Buzz 🐝
Dear Hive Community❗
Time flies. I barely noticed September slipping by: its first weeks went into preparing for HiveFest and the European Blockchain Convention, and the rest into taking a very active part in both events.
EBC
At EBC we met many fascinating people, and most of them were genuinely interested in the technology the Hive platform offers. One of the most popular topics was the optimizations we have made to the hived node in recent years. These let our blockchain run on truly low-budget hardware, so we could present Hive and its whole technology stack as environmentally friendly and economical to maintain. That is not the platform's only strength, of course. Near-instant block finality and zero transaction fees make it an ideal environment for real-world applications.
Below are a few photos from our booth:
HiveFest
After several intense days at EBC, it was time for this year's HiveFest. It was a real pleasure to meet everyone again and present the results of our work since last autumn, along with our plans for the near future.
Last year we carried out a series of optimizations, and some of them, mainly around HAF and applications, are still ongoing. I hope they will lead to a new release of the entire application stack that powers our platform.
The main goal of these changes was to optimize testing and the application build process, so that AI-assisted development can iterate faster. Faster data synchronization matters a lot too, because it allows quicker testing against data from the production servers behind https://api.hive.blog.
You can find the details in the video linked below, presented by @itsola representing @thebeedevs and @howo: Ola & Howo talk
Using AI extensively to support developers is extremely valuable and radically changes what is within our reach. Work that once had to be planned over months can now be done in a few weeks.
Unfortunately, it doesn't bring only benefits. AI coding agents create a number of challenges for the team responsible for application stability and quality, especially for the hived code that handles L1 operations.
A crucial task today is to preserve the core ideas and architecture and to keep control over changes to the codebase. That control prevents the codebase from degrading through duplicated (copy-pasted) code or needlessly complex solutions. As a result, the maintainer team's job is actually much harder now. The sheer speed at which AI models produce code makes it harder still, and that speed doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with quality. Naturally, we are also bringing AI models into this review work, to prepare and automate the process up front.
Other important topics we covered during our talks on September 18, 2026, at AkashaHub concerned our plans for the future, mainly for L1.
Bringing Resource Credits control into Hive's consensus rules raises several new problems to solve:
- a unified representation of the custom_json containing rc_delegation and of the newly added, fully fledged L1 operation
rc_delegation - mechanisms to detect divergences in node state (so-called state stamping). This feature could also be used for certain virtual operations that change critical L1 parameters, such as account balances. A good example is recurrent_transfer. Exchanges don't support it for exactly this reason: only the initial transfer is included in a transaction. The problem is broader, and I believe it deserves a separate article.
Beyond that, we believe we should consider extending how authority is represented in Hive. One of the proposals in the MetaIssue is to extend the authority implementation with a script engine (as known from Bitcoin). This would make it possible to tie authorities to specific L1 or even L2 operations. For example, operations related to community management or follows could have their own authority levels. It would also allow custom_json to be combined with custom authority levels.
Another operation we would like to introduce is custom_binary. It would ultimately limit the size of custom_json on the blockchain itself and store operation data more efficiently.
I encourage you to join the discussion on the shape of L1 and on what the already partially defined HardFork 29 should bring.
Finally, a short personal reflection. We believe we have a very mature platform from a technology standpoint, especially its L1, and it is rather sad that so few people have actually heard of Hive. In my opinion, the lack of a broader Hive presence at an event as big as EBC is a huge missed opportunity.
Decentralization should not be confused with disorganization. Like other decentralized organizations, the Hive community should develop a coherent and effective model for managing the Hive brand and image. Without it, growing the platform's popularity, at least on the social side, is very much in doubt.
Personally, though, I have great hopes for using our technology in practical, real-world applications, which @mtyszczak already wrote about in his article: /@mtyszczak/hive-fest-2026-workshops-real-hive-client-on-a-battery
Below you'll find the materials we published on the first day of HiveFest. I'll write about the second day and the workshops soon.
Bartek's talk Sorry - I know my pronunciation isn't great...
At the end and thanks to @roelandp we did a small quiz about Hive - not so easy as you can see :-)
Thanks for your attention. Your feedback is invaluable and always welcome.
thebeedevs Team
