Happy New Year everyone!

^{- Steem New Year 2019 Promo Video}

What has happened in the Steem Universe in 2018?

• We started the year 2018 with v0.19.2.
• In February, v0.19.4 (AppBase) was released that included significant architectural changes to steemd and restructured APIs.
• It was followed by bug fix releases.
• Steem was listed on Binance and GOPAX
• In March, Steem had its 2nd birthday.
• Steem was listed on Huobi.
• In May, one millionth account was created on the Steem blockchain.
• In July, due to a bug, an invalid transaction that was allowed into a block caused the blockchain to stall for a brief moment at block 23847548 .
• v0.19.10 brought us a new account history plugin backed by RocksDB instead of Boost memory mapped files, a huge improvement for API nodes running account history.
• In September, v0.20.0 was released, preparing us for HardFork20
• Before the HF20 scheduled date, on September 17, the chain unexpectedly forked when the nodes that were already running 0.20.0 produced blocks that did not match the consensus of the nodes that were still running version 19 of steemd.
• Hardfork 20 happened at block 26256743 (2018-09-25 15:00:00 UTC).
• We transitioned from the old bandwidth system to a new Resource Credits system, and after many iterations, we finally achieved stability.
• In November, SteemFest³ was held in Poland!

• Later that month, Ned Scott, CEO of Steemit Inc., announced that given the weakness of the cryptocurrency market they had been forced to lay off almost 70% of the staff.
• In December, Steemit Inc. announced updated Blockchain Roadmap and Cost Reductions, followed by the introduction of MIRA a.k.a Multi Index RocksDB Adapter, which will allow Steem blockchain nodes to store almost all necessary data on a disk in a modern database instead of in RAM (in a way that previously applied to the account history plugin)

At the beginning of the year, a consensus node needed 52GB for the blockchain and 19GB for the shared memory file, and at the end of the year, these requirements are 167GB and 47GB respectively (More on that in upcoming Steem Pressure episode)

This year has been also a year of SteemMonsters!
One of the first and most successful collectible card games on a blockchain.

While Steemit.com is now in what is called a “maintenance mode”, various alternative front-ends are growing in strength:

• SteemPeak
• busy
• Steeve
• eSteem
• Partiko

What will the New Year bring for Steem?

Steem On