So, I'm excited to share that things are moving along in the P2P network. Tomorrow we're upgrading the primary node, and we're taking a snapshot of the chain to make replaying is super easy for new witnesses.

Once the upgrade and snapshot are done we'll get it fired up again. We're expecting the whole upgrade to take about an hour, though if things go wrong it could be longer. During this time all hive-engine services will be down. Please plan accordingly.

What are we doing and why are we doing it?

We're making it so that the hive-engine ecosystem is run off of multiple nodes simultaneously. It can help protect assets from things like individual server hacks (facepalm). It makes it less dependent on us as a team and allows more people to have a say in how it operates and what it can do.

It also gives more people an incentive to help the entire ecosystem grow.

What's next?

After the upgrade we'll announce details on actually running the witness system. Witness voting will be based on your WORKERBEE total. Witnesses will earn BEE. We'll run a test net in production of the witness server for 2 weeks. Assuming everything is going as planned we'll actually launch the full P2P network. So, here's hoping by the end of February that we're a major step further along the decentralized spectrum.

What's after P2P?

Well, lot's of people are doing lots of things, but for this moment I want to call attention to our plan to make SMTs live on the layer 2 as smart contracts. You won't just have to rely on scotbot, but can actually implement it all as a smart contract is the plan.

Best place to make a blockchain business!

Our goal is to make hive-engine the single best place on the web to start a blockchain business. Getting our P2P layer functioning seems like a great step in the direction. Please cheer on the devs, and calm yourself down tomorrow night when Engine is briefly offline.