In the past few weeks, HF24 has been put through its paces by dedicated community testing - the tentative initial and interim suggested dates have come and gone as issues have been uncovered, but with the latest round of fixes, we now have an official hard fork date of October 6th, 2020.
Set your alarms and get ready for Eclipse! 🌒🌑🌘
You'll note that if you view this post at PeakD.com, there is a countdown timer to the hard fork attached to it. You can also find a live countdown at Hive.io.
The Hive blockchain does not fork at a specific block height (after a certain amount of finalized blocks) like some chains. A timestamp is set in the code, and when a super-majority of witness servers are running the upgrade at or after this time, the chain will fork to the new version. In non-tech speak: as long as enough of the top 20 are running HF24 when we hit the coded time on October 6th, the hardfork happens automagically.
Exact time of Hive Hardfork 24: October 6, 2020, 14:00 UTC/GMT
Why has it taken so long?
One of the things that's happened during past code base updates is a lack of testing, which certainly isn't acceptable now given how much is changing under the hood for Hive during this upgrade. During the direct run up to the first tentative date some pretty large bugs were discovered and squashed, and hived (the actual blockchain code) has been test run and successfully forked as many times as possible between then and now. The last few largest delays have been related to Hivemind, which is the extensive API powering all of the features of your favorite Hive dApps. Getting it prepared and working smoothly has been the final piece to make sure we have a hardfork where there's no disruption to any Hive user doing anything they love to use the blockchain for. With both of these components in place, it's finally time to get ready for the hardfork!
What happens now that the HF24 date is set?
Exchanges have been notified of the upgrade, and some have already begun posting about their intention to update and subsequent outages. (See: Binance, Huobi) You will notice that the exchanges supporting Hive will have their wallets go temporarily down for maintenance as they update their nodes to the new version in anticipation of the fork. A big plus is that the new version will be much quicker for them to spin up or replay, which means that downtime and wallet maintenance will be much easier for them going forwards.
Over this next week, it's a final run for all dApps and projects to test and make sure their services won't be interrupted. A lot of information on development and information on places to learn more about the ecosystem from the last post is still applicable, which you can find here in the HF info mega post: @hiveio/tentative-hardfork-date-hive-hf24-information
If you run a Hive node, you can find the final code release here: https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/tags/v1.24.2
For most of you, there's nothing different or special that you need to do to prepare- the hardfork will not require anything from end users. It's been a long road to properly prepare Hive to power your social, your business, and your dreams, but it has been worth the ride. 🚀