Hive Whale
a life-sized sperm whale on the blockchain

📥 Recent transactions
pay for a spray by donating to @whalefountain on Hive

🎞 Gallery
pay for a spray by donating to @whalefountain on Hive

You get a GIF souvenir with your user and #blocknumber from the Whale back!

🙋 F.A.Q.

What is this (wh)all(e) about?

The "Hive" Whale is a recently deployed fountain in the form of a life-size spermwhale, as part of the 11fountains project in the province of Friesland in the North of the Netherlands. I've hooked up the whalefountain to the Hive blockchain to demonstrate the power and speed of this decentralised platform. Now anyone can donate some Hive or Hive Based Dollar and get an instant fountain spray burst in return.

You are mentioning Hive, what is it?

Hive is a blockchain dedicated to multimedia applications and a social network too. On the Hive blockchain anyone can get an account and post and curate content. The key features of the Hive blockchain are:

• There is no corporate ownership. All users together are the owners of (part of) the Hive blockchain.
• Due to it's decentralised nature, access to the content is virtually impossible to be blocked.
• There is 100% freedom of speech. You are responsible for the stuff you publish. There is no censorship.
• All value created within the Hive blockchain is returned to its users and maintainers by distributing rewards for created content and curated content. There is not a corporation owning your data, mining it and making a profit out of it.

The Hive blockchain ecosystem is very versatile. It all started with 1 blogging platform interface hive.blog which resembles Medium meets Reddit, but has over the course of 4 years grown to 100's of apps, for example a decentralised youtube called 3Speak, decentralised Soundcloud, called Dsound and many many more.

Ok, multimedia on a blockchain, I see... But what does it have to do with this whale?

Contrary to other blockchains, the Hive chain is very fast. Every 3 seconds a new block is produced with the latest transactions. This means that if you donate to the HiveWhale, it will respond near instant with your spray.

Can I visit the HiveWhale?

Sure! The HiveWhale is deployed for 10 years to come (minimum) and can be visited daily by walking down the "Willemhaven southern pier" in the harbour of Harlingen, Friesland, The Netherlands. Coordinates: 53° 10' 22.3248'' N 5° 24' 29.4048'' E.

About the HiveWhale

The whale is huge. Really big. Wow. 18 meters (60 feet). Fixed in concrete on poles. The whale partly submerges with rising tide but continues to spray during the day. At night the whale is sleeping :) Only deployed for a couple of weeks now, especially during the summer the whale has become a tourist attraction on its own. Many people go there for a stroll and wait for a spray :)

What will you do with the donations?

The donations will go to an ocean preservation cause.

How was HiveWhale made?

Basically the fountain is being controlled by a microcomputer which in its turn controls several relays. Inside the belly of the whale is a pressurised canister and a water tank. By controlling the valves via the electronic relays through hydraulic switches a spray occurs. We have added several nozzles on the whalefountain which it will randomly pick. The blockchain part is being controlled from a third party server which continuously monitors the '@whalefountain'-account on the Hive-chain and processes new donations in near real time as they appear in blocks.

Who made this?

The HiveWhale is a joint effort and result of the hard work by many people. I had a humble job to code the whale's spray sequences and thought it would be fun to hook it up to the Hive blockchain. My name is @roelandp and I am a (blockchain) developer and event organiser.