It has now been seven years since I first joined this community, and one year since my last post - which was about my six year Hive-iversary. You can find that post here: @yabapmatt/6-year-anniversary-post
Having re-read it now, I think that pretty much everything still applies a year later. It seems like the past year has been a year of building, with a lot of exciting projects underway that will hopefully be able to propel this ecosystem forward and help us compete in an increasingly crowded market of blockchain platforms.
For myself, I have spent the past year trying to get Splinterlands back on solid footing so that we can take advantage of what I expect could be another massive year for blockchain and web3 projects in 2025 and once again showcase to the world what is possible on the Hive blockchain.
I am extremely thankful and humbled for the support that the Hive community is currently giving us through our DHF proposal, and I take that responsibility very seriously. I don't know what the future holds, and I can't guarantee that Splinterlands will ultimately be successful, but I can guarantee that I am going to put everything I have towards making it work and providing substantially more value back to the Hive ecosystem than we have received.
I'm extremely excited to be able to attend Hivefest in person this year in Split, Croatia (the last time I attended in person was 2018 in Krakow, Poland), and I can't wait to meet many of you (or see you again for those who were in Poland) and get a chance to talk in person. I'm honored to have been asked to give a talk at the event, and I'm planning to do a bit of a deep dive on why exactly Hive is the best platform for decentralized application development, and what I think the challenges are, based on my experiences over the last 7 years as a Hive app developer.
This post is going to be significantly shorter than last year's, but that's mostly because I need to work on my Hivefest presentation and I'll be sharing a lot more thoughts about the Hive ecosystem there.
Here's to another amazing year on Hive and I hope to see you in Split!