As you can see (or not, because you died of boredom in the meantime), I wasn’t lying in the introduction to my previous witness update.

^{Full HD video rendered exclusively for my witness updates}

You can work for Steem

Steemit Inc. is hiring, but that’s not the only opportunity for talented individuals who want to power up our platform.
There are plenty of other open source, Steem-powered projects that need your help, and you can use Utopian to monetize your contributions.
I’ve delegated 100,000 SP to Utopian to incentivize development.
(Another great reason is that @utopian-io supports @steemstem!)
If you are taking first steps, take a look at some tutorials

Exchanges

Poloniex is back on track. Let's hope that it will stay that way.
When it comes to trading volume of STEEM, Poloniex suffered a lot during their downtime.
Competition wasn't waiting, Upbit, Binance, Huobi and Bittrex, any of them had at least 2x bigger volume in the last 24h.
You've asked for it, Poloniex.

Stalled blockchain

On 3 July, the Steem blockchain stalled at block 23847548 due to an invalid transaction (and lack of trivial checks). Steemit Inc. developers did a great job quickly identifying the root cause of the problem and issuing the patch. Witnesses upgraded their nodes, and the blockchain resumed normal operation.

State of Steem

Produced blocks	24,608,983
Accounts	1,095,387
Blockchain size	133 GB
Consensus state size	45 GB
Full node state size	503 GB

block_log

Over the past month, the total bandwidth used to serve just that one file crossed 100TB. The reasons for that included increased demand after the 3 July incident.
That was a good signal to increase bandwidth limits and make the compressed version of that file available again for at least a month.

Up-to-date blockchain data

available for download at:
https://gtg.steem.house/get/blockchain/block_log

Periodically updated, highly compressed blockchain data

available for download at:
https://gtg.steem.house/get/blockchain.xz/block_log.xz
(compatible with parallel, indexed xz)
It’s 2.6x smaller than the uncompressed data, but might be even few weeks behind the head block.

Delays in moving to AppBase

There are some delays in moving to AppBase within my infrastructure, because as the saying goes better safe than sorry, but I expect to start the upgrade next week. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, to compensate you for such inconvenience, I’ve upgraded the hardware for the main public full node.

2nd Warsaw Steem Meetup

The meetup provided an excellent opportunity to get to know some of the members of the Polish community and talk about their new projects:

• Wise - @noisy and @jblew presented an innovative way of spreading votes on Steem. More on that in @lukestokes Interview with Noisy
• Glodniwiedzy is a news portal that brings together quality content creators to enable them to publish articles on joint accounts. It is based on the SteemCMS framework, which will be published soon. Everyone will be able to create Steem-based websites to host high-quality, moderated content, attract audiences and earn tokens together.
• Engrave is the first of its kind blogging platform that is based on the Steem network. It will allow users to create personal, customized and powerful blogs in just a few clicks. Bloggers can make money easily by just posting high-quality articles and build their own brand with their own domains. Engrave has all the features that other blogging engines have and even more. It takes only three simple steps to start creating a blog and earning money.
• Steemfounders want to make it easier for new and valuable creators to quickly create their accounts so that they can share their content with us and monetize it. Steemfounders will let you publish your first post to fund your new account as soon as possible. All rewards from that post are then transferred to your account.
  Guide for users applying for an account with Steemfounders

The meeting was great, but we already know that it was not biggest Steem event of the year in Poland…

SteemFest³ announced!

@roelandp has revealed the first details of our third annual global gathering!
I had the pleasure to attend both the first SteemFest in Amsterdam and the second SteemFest in Lisbon. We know the place and date of the third one: 7-11 November, Krakow, Poland.
More details will be revealed soon, so follow @steemfest and make sure you book hotels in advance.

steem.chat

Upgrades, bug fixing, cleaning, fighting with abuse.
Our goal is to integrate with Steem, actually we had a working PoC a long time ago, but there are still some minor issues on our way.
Many thanks to all moderators and their huge efforts to keep the chat a pleasant place.

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^{If you believe I can be of value to Steem, please vote for me (gtg) as a witness on Steemit's Witnesses List or set (gtg) as a proxy that will vote for witnesses for you.
Your vote does matter!
You can contact me directly on steem.chat, as Gandalf}

Steem On