Save the Date: March 31st is when a new era begins!

We are thrilled to announce the official soft launch date of the VSC Network Mainnet and as a result, the future of Hive.

The wait is almost over, folks. This milestone marks the beginning of a new era for Hive. The road that led us here was not a straight one, nor a smooth one, but a challenging path full of hurdles with months of hardcore coding, sleepless nights, and massive amounts of coffee. We set out to build a Layer 2 network to bring smart contracts to Hive, with the longer-term goal of seamlessly connecting Hive to the world’s biggest liquidity layers. Enabling the future of DAPPs on Hive, and a major step forward in turning Hive into a cross chain interoperability hub.

It is no secret within the community that Hive exists on an island of sorts, disconnected from many large sources of liquidity and ecosystems. With a complicated onboarding experience requiring the creation of a Hive account, limited cross-chain connections, and a lack of availability on centralized exchanges, especially in the U.S... Hive has been isolated for far too long, limiting its full potential. While Hive has support for an amazing toolset including unique usernames, free transactions, a native stablecoin, account abstraction, and so much more. It has been handycapped by two simple issues far too long: Smart Contracts, and over reliance on CEXs. Now, it's time for that to change. We are taking Hive to new levels with smart contracts, wrapped Bitcoin, and a next-gen decentralized exchange like none you've ever seen. Mark your calendars and prepare to cross a major milestone in this journey forward.

Important note - wrapped Bitcoin and the Altera DeFi front-end will not be available immediately at launch, and will be released in subsequent launch.

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The Journey

For the past 12 months, we have been designing, researching, and testing cutting-edge features on the VSC testnet, allowing us to map out our exact design going forward. In the process, we’ve released nearly 2 separate testnets, allowing us to gain invaluable knowledge on what we could build. As part of this journey, we were presented with the challenge of being required to rebuild the original VSC core software from Javascript to Golang, a much-needed improvement. Nonetheless, this has been a major topic of development over the last 8 months of work. Thankfully, we are nearly done with that migration, bringing a whole world of improvements from stability to features that were originally not thought of until recent.

As part of the soft launch, we will be starting up a pre-mainnet network to do any final tests and bug fixes before it is officially live. Thanks to the work we have been doing on end-to-end testing, we have been able to fully test the VSC mainnet locally before even putting any of the code live. This has allowed us to fully develop and test features fully well before they even interact with the Hive blockchain, vastly shortening our development time. Our goal is to launch within the coming days, assuming no major issues are found during our final development and testing stretch.

Shortly after the Mainnet launch, we will be releasing a newly updated smart contract SDK and contract template to make development straightforward. In addition, we will be adding support for our second smart contract language: Golang. Golang is a great industry standard language with a large variety of already existing and compatible libraries, complementing the already supported, JavaScript-like language, AssemblyScript. This marks a major advancement towards democratizing smart contract access and brings us one step closer to our goal of a code in any language future.

If you are looking to develop on VSC, you can check out the Documentation site for all the information you or your team might need to start building on VSC. In addition, we recommend reaching out to us on our Discord server for closer assistance.

What comes next

You might be thinking to yourself, “Well, I’m not a developer. What does this mean for me?”. Totally fair, so let’s break it down for the average user. One of the biggest issues Hive faces is the complicated and fragmented onboarding experience. With VSC, users will be able to seamlessly connect using their EVM wallet (plus more soon) and interact with the Hive blockchain. If you're running a project that relies on being able to easily trade between HIVE and HBD, you have probably noticed that there is not a lot of liquidity on the Hive internal market. VSC is going to solve both of these problems with non-Hive wallet support and the first-ever HIVE-HBD liquidity pool. These are just the first steps in our longer-term vision of connecting Hive to other blockchains via decentralized bridges.

The Future of Login On Hive ✅

Remember when you first came to Hive and had to go through the process of downloading a wallet, getting your 5 different keys, and all of the complicated steps to get started? That’s a thing of the past. VSC will allow anyone to connect whichever wallet they prefer (EVM wallet and social login support out of the gate) and start interacting with Hive through our front-end application. This means buying, selling, and sending Hive assets without the need to ever create a Hive account. We recommend checking out our blog post on user experience for some insights into our design choice and what this will look like for you. A little further down the road, VSC account users will even be able to create blog posts and comments on Hive + earn rewards!

The VSC launch opens many doors for existing Hive dApps to utilize VSC's EVM wallet compatibility. Enabling end users to seamlessly use their EVM wallet to interact with dApps or on-chain games seamlessly. At launch, EVM wallets will be able to own, send, and receive Hive assets without intermediaries. Picture a brand new user landing on your game, and they're presented with the option to use their existing wallet or social login. The friction of onboarding is completely removed, and the user can start playing right away without thinking twice. Then, after they have been playing and earning crypto, if your game allows that, they are able then to seamlessly trade those assets with HIVE/HBD/BTC. Hive is about to get so much easier.

ALTERA: Next-gen DeFi

Once we have the Mainnet live and stable, our next step will be the deployment of our DeFi application, currently called "Altera". Altera will be your DeFi hub, allowing enabling users to login with Hive, EVM, or Social login options to start. With a huge focus on creating an easy-to-use and extremely user-friendly interface, it will feel very similar to a traditional finance application. Manage assets from different chains, provide liquidity to earn yield, and trade your favorite assets with ease. No complicated signup process, no transaction fees, fully secure and decentralized. Altera will make Hive the place where any user, no matter their chain preference or knowledge about crypto, will come together.

Imagine using your Metamask wallet to manage your Hive and Solana assets. Better yet, use your Hive Keychain wallet to manage your Ethereum and Bitcoin. What about using your Gmail account to manage your assets on any supported chain? This is the kind of experience we are bringing to life with our DeFi application. We are already working on selecting the first chains that will merge on Altera, with a clear focus on Bitcoin.

Bringing wrapped Bitcoin to Hive will not only attract new capital into the ecosystem but it will also help with scaling it as an alternative to Lightning Network. Using Bitcoin can be very expensive depending on the size of the transactions you're doing, and Lightning Network has a huge transaction failure rate along with its own challenges. Wrapped Bitcoin on Hive will launch a few months after the mainnet launch as we continue testing and fine-tuning our Bitcoin chain relay. There will be an announcement for this as well, so keep an eye out for future updates.

HIVE-HBD liquidity pool

In the following weeks after the launch of the VSC Mainnet, our DeFi application "Altera" will open its doors to its first users outside of testing. In conjunction with the application launch, the first-ever HIVE-HBD liquidity pool will go live, allowing for true DeFi to kick off on Hive. Enabling price-efficient trading between HIVE and HBD, reducing slippage, eliminating spread, and incentivizing liquidity. Further stabilizing the price of HBD due to increased liquidity. Users will also have the ability to deposit HIVE and HBD as liquidity to the pool, allowing them to earn yield from swap fee just like any other DEX AMM Pool. Longer term, we aim to pair HBD with other major stablecoins such as USDC and DAI.

The HIVE-HBD liquidity pool will make trades more efficient, offer more liquidity, and enable smart contracts to easily interact with the market. This liquidity pool removes the need for creating an internal market order and having to wait for it to be matched. Faster trade execution with a direct liquidity pool will give users real-time pricing and more reliable trades. It will also allow the execution of trades at any size, so long as the user accepts the slippage. The HIVE-HBD pool will be the first of many deployed on VSC, and we can't wait to add more as we build value for the ecosystem. Say goodbye to the days of visiting multiple different DeFi applications to trade assets on different chains using different wallets. VSC puts it all in one place with a super-simple interface powered by next-gen smart contracts.

We will have more details on liquidity pools and features after the launch. We truly believe this will be extremely valuable for the Hive Blockchain and will expand horizons greatly as we continue adding more connections.

How you can support us

As we support the Hive blockchain, we invite you to support our Hive witness node by casting your vote. We encourage you to reach out to our team if you are interested in collaborating with VSC or if you have any issues with your project on our network. We highly recommend that you bring your community along and join our Discord server as well. You can find us on socials at the links below, so make sure to give us a follow!

Conclusion

We are thrilled to bring VSC to life on Mainnet, and we hope you join us in celebration on March 31st. The next few months will include releases such as wrapped Bitcoin on VSC, the HIVE-HBD liquidity pool, and the next-gen DeFi front end. These are just some of the advancements from VSC that will take Hive to new levels and pave the way for a highly inter-connected and interoperable future.

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We wanted to add some of the questions that we believe you may have when reading this post. Take a look and let us know if you have any other questions in the comments!

FAQs:

• I am a developer. What language should I use for smart contracts?

VSC uses WebAssembly (or WASM) to power its smart contracts. WASM enables developers to write smart contracts in any WASM-compatible language, taking advantage of thousands of already existing libraries and tools. The VSC Smart Contract SDK will initially support Golang and AssemblyScript. We will gradually support more languages as time goes on.

• Can I create tokens on VSC now?

Token support is possible via VSC smart contracts in a similar fashion to how they are done on Ethereum, Solana, etc... However, at this point in time, we have not yet built standardized token formats similar to EIP-721.

• Can I move a token from Hive Engine to VSC?

We do not support any kind of bridging or migration from HE to VSC at this time. We are working to address this issue in the future.

• Can I create blog posts using VSC and an EVM wallet?

Not at the moment; we are working on ways to enable posting from a VSC account in collaboration with our various Hive partners.

• Will there be transaction fees on VSC?

Similar to transactions on Hive, transactions on VSC consume resource credits but do not have a monetary cost.

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Latest articles:

• User Experience Matters in Crypto
• How Resource Credits work on VSC
• Hive is now EVM compatible, thanks to VSC.

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