Hey everyone!

Some people have been asking me lately what I think about the Hardfork and what I am working on currently. Unfortunately a lot of the things I'm working on are things I can't really talk about openly cause there is a lot of competition going around, which on its own is a good thing, but I'd like my ideas not to get stolen before they see the light of day. It is great to see the Steem blockchain innovating and new projects popping up constantly even though we might be at the bottom of the bear market currently, its a great sign for the future. As I remember in the past a lot more projects popped up and "announced" themselves when the prices were sky high thinking they will stay the same way forever and slowly but surely died off. Not all but many. That's why its a lot better seeing them popping up now with a brighter future ahead of us and that hopefully the prices can't get much lower than what they currently are. At the same time these projects will create a bigger demand on price and the teams and projects can grow with them. Same thing with SMT's or the so called "little Steems", they will all be a huge factor in demand for SP in my opinion.

All in all I think the hardfork was quite successful, I know it must've been a bit annoying for small stake users to not be able to use the blockchain the way they always could, but I think its a low cost to make life a lot harder for spammers and especially those who kept abusing account creation will now have almost no incentive to want accounts created that only have delegated RC and no free Steem. I am very excited about the near future of this blockchain and I am hoping the next bull run won't be as speculative as the last one, although its hard to stop dumb money or manipulation in the free market - I hope people have learned their lesson to invest in the ones that have actual potential for mass adoption. I believe Steem is on the forefront of that.

To get back to my personal Roadmap; I've been focusing on growing in SP as much as possible without selling my soul completely. There's been times where I've felt I'm being a really crappy curator for increasing my selfvoting while other times I've also felt that I wish I could take back some votes. That's something we can't have much control over really, who we can trust with stake distribution and who proves to only be in it for the short term, they do reveal themselves over time though and I hope the community will remember and reward those that have stuck to Steem and its best interest. I am also looking forward to more newcomers and what they will have to offer to our blockchain and its development and growth. Thankfully we will still have a couple decades of inflation and a high reward pool which will weed out the weak hands over time.

What I am going to focus on for the rest of the year is to bring back OCD at full swing with curation. Many of you may have heard about OCDB which will be announced next week and I believe it will be a big assistance to our project and quality authors that want to grow together with long term holders and those trying to see the big picture of this platform and ecosystem. Without talking too much about it as the announcement is coming soon, I'll skip to the next step.

As you know I'm also in charge with @ausbitbank to take care of our subreddit r/steemit (please subscribe to it if you haven't yet) and thanks to some wonderful Steemians that have been moderating it, it has already become a much nicer place than it was in the past when it mainly consisted of postpromotion. We are hoping to improve this gateway to newcomers and I plan on using most of my discounted accounts I've been claiming for onboarding of people that hear about Steem through that. There is also another awesome tool that has been created that will go hand in hand with it but I'll let the people that created it announce it first before I spill the beans about it here.

Having been a gamer for over two decades I also want to continue supporting that activity on the blockchain through game related content and streaming. I have been checking out vimm.tv lately and it looks really great considering it is still in alpha, I hope it will be the next big streaming platform to enable any Steemians easy access to streaming. I will also be doubling my delegation to @steemgc (discord link) which has grown to 1000 members on their discord to curate gaming related posts and streams and help them continue to develop on some ideas they have going.

Like I said there are also a couple projects I've been working on on the side which hopefully I will be able to announce and release before newyear. I've met a lot of great Steemians this year and I have faith that they will do a great job with these projects even though they don't have any direct funding, it is amazing to see how many are investing their time into Steem in one way or another as they all believe in the success of the platform and blockchain.

With all that's been said, there will hopefully always be some free voting power left to let me curate accounts manually here and there which I've been doing for over two years now and still love to do. If you have any questions regarding this post, feel free to ask but I may not be able to answer to everything in full detail as it may be things that are still a bit under the hood.

Thanks for reading and sticking with the community thus far. For anyone new reading this, don't give up hope if things are difficult at the beginning, most of us have been there and have found their way to becoming more connected with the communities and people active on the platform. :)