![hiveengine.png](https://images.hive.blog/DQmR9muEUhmmSieeJ9hNvHbdzW2jdxEgpYaqPLqDaDH3m5T/hive-engine.png)

Sometimes we just takes things for granted without much understanding or appreciation of the technologies we are utilizing. I always have been of a thought that Hive-engine is a great asset for Hive blockchain. I haven't given much thought about it as a technology. Only today I came to a realization what a brilliant technology it is.

We normally refer to the core blockchain as a technology, and everything build on top or around it as just some app or tool that uses the blockchain. Hive-engine power layer 2 tribes and apps, and enables Hive participants create economies and experiment with new ideas. I normally would visit Hive-engine website once in a while to stake the rewards from tribes. 

Today I wanted to do something else. I wanted to unstake all staked hive-engine tokens just as an experiment. It is most likely I will end up staking them. I just wanted to see how long unstaking would take. When I saw the page that showed all pending unstakes, I realized how complicated it must have been to build such a system. The image above is the screenshot of my pending unstakes. While most tokens seems to have chosen 4 weeks for unstaking, others use more or less time. It even looks like not all withdrawals have weekly payments. Vyb has 25 transactions to unstake all, but they might be daily payments. We can't know for sure until we try and this was the purpose of unstaking them all. 

Anyway, as I was trying to understand how unstaking works, staring at this page, looking at these long alphanumeric transactions IDs, I kept thinking how do they even keep track of everything. With blockchains, we sort of understand how the whole system is built around security of native coins, timestamps, consensus algorithms and the magic happens. But layer 2 solutions aren't really blockchains, or are they? Maybe they are. I guess it would depend how on how they work.

Hive-engine is not a new things. It has been around for years now. It is even older than Hive itself, in its rebranded form. It has proven to be a relying sidechain and created new possibilities for Hive ecosystem. Of course it is more than just staking and unstaking tokens. There is much more to it. But just thinking about how staking/unstaking works is good enough to see how brilliant the vision was behind it, and how brilliant it is as a technology.

Ned Scott of Steemit Inc has gone into a blockchain history as someone who sold out the community and threw them under the bus. But he had good ideas. One of them was Smart Media Tokens for the blockchain. Although the idea was born as response to Dan Larimer's departure to build EOS, it made sense to have some sort smart contract feature for the blockchain. I was too naive to even believe that they would be able to deliver this feature before EOS launched. They were finally able to complete somewhat usable SMTs integration to the blockchain. But it was too late, others things were happening, by this time Ned had different plans and was pretty much done with blockchain stuff.

There were those who didn't want to wait for Steemit Inc to finish the project, or perhaps even foresaw they wouldn't be able to. Builders don't wait, they just build. Aggroed and Yabapmatt were these builders. I don't know much about who was involved in building Hive-engine. I think there were more developers, or they joined later. But my understanding always was the Aggroed had the vision, and Yabapmatt made it a reality. Or am I confusing it with Splinterlands? Correct me if I am wrong in the comments.

Regardless the history, Hive-engine was born long time ago, and we still don't have native Hive smart contracts. It seems discussion has ended on native smart contract on Hive, and most developers have agreed layer 2 solutions is a better way to move forward. Hive-engine has proven that there has been a demand for such solutions and many things happened since its creations. Splinterlands becoming a top crypto game and being a reason for onboarding many to Hive is just amazing. Awesome tribe economies emerged like LeoFinance, ProofOfBrain, StemGeeks, Neoxian, Palnet, Cinetv, Vyb, etc. I am sure there are more that I don't even know about yet.

LeoFinance alone became great success and outgrew a tribe stage and created its own ecosystem and continues building interesting platforms that wouldn't be possible without solutions like Hive-engine to enable and empower experimenting with these ideas. Hive-engine provided tools for people to experiment with new ideas and economies. Some of the tribes have proven that content rewards don't really have to rely on Hive native content rewards. ProofOfBrain came up with a unique idea. Airdrops kept happening and kept Hive participants more enthusiastic about things to come. All of these development add great amount of value to the bigger Hive economy and its participants. Even if some tokens may have a value of penny or less, they are still more than nothing.

Tribe rewards utilized tags to keep track of content that authors intended to be included in certain tribes. Normally tags are used to define the category or topic that is discussed in the post. I am sure if there was a better way, instead of tags there would be some other solution. Yes, authors and readers can use tribe or app front ends, and not only hiveBlog, peakD, or Ecency. But at the same time it is in authors' best interest to be able to reach wider audience. Some tribe members strictly focus on tribe based content and perhaps only use those front-ends. If an author is not using tribe tags, they might be missing out on some group of audience on Hive. So, I would recommend to authors to use tribe tags whenever appropriate. Of course, some tribes are topic/category based, so they would require tags to be used only if the post is relevant to the certain category of topics.

Hive-engine powers all these tribes, games and apps. Hive is great. But it is a greater with Hive-engine. Perhaps in the future there will be more layer 2 solutions. That is great too. It is not easy to build brilliant technologies. Maybe that's why we still don't have SMTs or anything that could compete with Hive-engine. 



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