For a long time I was below the top 200 witnesses, but recently my fellow brazilian witness @fernandosoder noticed I have reached the top 200.
First of all, I have rented my node for 1 whole year, so I confident that I won't have any downtime, but if I reach the top 100 I will start looking at getting a second one, for backup, probably in another continent, to make sure it is up 24/7!
There is a risk I may reach the top 100 within 1 year, as old votes from inactive users expire and I get new votes.
Talking about it:
Click here and vote me for witness on HiveSigner
Or use your preferred signing tool to vote me:
https://vote.hive.uno/@igormuba
I was not very worried about my responsibilities as a witness while I was so low, though I did my duties to keep the price feed up to date, choose an HBD interest rate and keep my node online 24/7. The smaller you are the more irrelevant your actions are, but I always kept my feeds updated, because DeFi solutions rely on up-to-date price feeds from witnesses, regardless of our size.
Now as a top 200 I feel like I should engage more. I still have a full time job, but I will try to gather ideas and "hackaton" during the weekends to develop tools to help people on Hive.
As a witness, the main thing I support right now is increasing the HBD APY from 10% to 12%. We can afford that because HBD is worth over $1 (1.05 right now), so inflation won't destroy the peg. The benefits of raising the HBD yield is attracting investors to see Hive not only as a social network, but also a wild and unexplored DeFi ecosystem that they can build on top of.
We can, and should, promote Hive not only as a social network, but as a robust DeFi platform. The price is going up, and would be wise to use the momentum to increase rates. Just like countries use the momentum to increase the money supply and attract investors and developers.
In regards to coding, I have built only 2 tools so far, and I am not actively improving them, as not many people are using. Those are:
https://github.com/igormuba/hive_remote_sbd_balances
That keeps track of the HBD that was sent to your account, possibly allowing accounts to serve as banks, reserves or funds. The documentation is very poor, if there is interest I will improve it this weekend.
https://github.com/igormuba/crypdonations
A barebones donation monitoring API. Also needs improvement and will work on it on weekends according to demand.
I am taking ideas. Sadly, for now, I can only work on open source during weekends, as I have a full time job and a language course and university to attend during weekdays.
I will make those votes count. Looking forward to reach the top 100.