Seed nodes are pretty important to keep Hive up and running. They are nodes that fresh nodes can connect to and get data from. We've got a quite a few in Europe right now, but not so much in other regions, especially in the US.

So you guys probably know that I run a seed node on `hiveseed.rishipanthee.com` on port `2001`. One thing to know about this seed node is that it's not just one node behind it, but like the api node operators with multiple nodes, this seed node url has multiple seed nodes behind it. To see how many, you can grab all DNS entries for the node and see them all. 

```
host hiveseed.rishipanthee.com
hiveseed.rishipanthee.com has address 64.62.202.12
hiveseed.rishipanthee.com has address 23.150.40.194
hiveseed.rishipanthee.com has IPv6 address 2602:2b7:d11:5916::2
hiveseed.rishipanthee.com has IPv6 address 2602:fb95:2::4
```

We currently get 4 different addresses, 2 v4 and 2 v6. As of now each node is dual stacked(though hived ignores the v6 address, lets change that and close <a href="https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/issues/381">this gitlab issue</a>(go give it a thumbs up so that way the dev team can see how many others want this too, dual stack support is always a benefit). 

The goal by the end of this year(more accurately by the end of August) is to get 2 more nodes in this. Right now we have San Francisco and Kansas City nodes up and running, with the goal of adding Chicago and New York City.

San Francisco is running via <a href="https://ryamer.com">Ryamer</a> and Kansas City is using <a href="https://f4.network/">F4</a>. Chicago will be via Ryamer as well and New York will be using F4 again. I've talked with the owner of F4 and his goal is to get that region up and running in August. I control Ryamer and my goal for Chicago is to get DC space and network finalized by the end of this month(if you are looking to get some dedicated servers in the region, lmk, and we might be able to make it happen) and then order the servers to get everything up and running by mid July.

I'll continue to expand this into more regions in 2025. I've looked a bit into asia, but sadly connectivity is EXTREMLY expensive out there, and so it's not the plans for the near future. But the US WEST coast nodes should cover asia decently well, and I'll probably add something in Los Angeles and Seattle in the future to help the region out as well.

All of this is funded via myself, so if you like what I'm doing, give my witness a vote. You can do so here, https://vote.hive.uno/@rishi556 or by using your favorite site and voting for @rishi556.