The modern Python library for the Hive blockchain. Built for production. Made to last.
beem built the foundation of Python development on Hive — but it carries a decade of legacy: unmaintained cryptography, filesystem assumptions that break in containers, and a sprawling API surface held together by history. Nectar is its opinionated spiritual successor, rebuilt from the ground up for security, resilience, and the environments developers actually deploy to today.
If you are using beem, Nectar is where you go next.
Three problems that break beem in modern deployments — and how Nectar solves them.
Nectar strips out python-ecdsa, pycryptodomex, and scrypt entirely — unmaintained libraries that represent real supply-chain risk in production systems. In their place:
- Coincurve: A Python binding to the battle-tested C library
libsecp256k1— the same one used by Bitcoin Core — for fast, audited signature generation, verification, and BIP32 HD key derivation. - cryptography: Python's industry-standard library for AES encryption, password hashing, and DER serialization.
No legacy dependencies. No known vulnerable paths. Just modern, auditable cryptography.
Standard blockchain libraries assume they can write to the host filesystem. In unprivileged Docker pods, Kubernetes clusters, or any read-only environment, that assumption causes silent failures or crashes at startup.
Nectar solves this with a transparent in-memory fallback: if the library cannot write to disk to create or update its local wallet, it automatically switches to an in-memory SQLite shared-cache database. No configuration. No storage mounts. No workarounds.
Deploy to any environment and it just works.
Nectar removes the condenser API legacy wrappers and local JSON specs that accumulated in beem over the years. What replaces them:
- Single Unified Path: Every JSON-RPC call uses the direct
api.methodshape, backed by a clean static OpenAPI mapping. - Shared Pooled Transport: Built on
httpx2with connection pooling, keep-alive, and automatic retry/backoff — resilient by default, not by configuration.
Requires Python >= 3.10.
pip install hive-nectarfrom nectar import Hive
from nectar.account import Account
hive = Hive()
account = Account("thecrazygm", blockchain_instance=hive)
print(f"Account: {account.name}")
print(f"HIVE Balance: {account.balances['HIVE']}")
print(f"HBD Balance: {account.balances['HBD']}")from nectar import Hive
from nectar.transactionbuilder import TransactionBuilder
from nectarbase.operations import Transfer
hive = Hive(keys=["your-active-private-key"]) # WARNING: Do not hardcode private keys in production. Load from environment variables or a vault.
tb = TransactionBuilder(blockchain_instance=hive)
tb.appendOps(Transfer(**{
"from": "youraccount",
"to": "recipientaccount",
"amount": "1.000 HIVE",
"memo": "Sent with Nectar"
}))
tb.sign()
tb.broadcast()FROM python:3.12-slim
RUN pip install hive-nectar
# No volume mounts or permissions required.
# Nectar detects the read-only environment and uses in-memory storage automatically.On platforms where binary wheels for coincurve and cryptography are not precompiled, build tools are required to compile the C extensions.
sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev python3-dev python3-pip libffi-dev libtool autoconf automake pkg-configsudo yum install gcc openssl-devel python-devel libffi-devel libtool autoconf automake pkgconfigbrew install openssl libtool autoconf automake libffi pkg-config
export CFLAGS="-I$(brew --prefix openssl)/include $CFLAGS"
export LDFLAGS="-L$(brew --prefix openssl)/lib $LDFLAGS"pkg install clang openssl python libtool autoconf automake libffiFor Ledger Nano S/X hardware wallet signing:
pip install ledgerblueNectar is a modernized fork of beem, originally built by Holger Nahrstaedt, and incorporates python-graphenelib by Fabian Schuh (xeroc). Their decade of work made this possible. Nectar exists to carry that work forward — not to replace the people behind it.
Nectar is developed and maintained by the Sustainable Resource and Business Development Enterprise (SRBDE) — an open-source infrastructure organization building tools and platforms for communities that build things together.
We apply the logic of agricultural sustainability to software: the goal is always to return more to the ecosystem than we extract.
- Open source is our value, not just our business model.
- Our commercial products fund our open-source core. The open work is the mission.
| Project | Description |
|---|---|
| Pollen | The modern Hive TypeScript SDK |
| Anther | The modern Hive Go SDK |
| Xylem | The modern Hive Rust SDK |
| Nectar | The modern Hive Python SDK |
| nectarengine | The Hive-Engine sidechain library |
| ecoinstats.net | SRBDE corporate hub |
| thecrazygm.com | Open gaming tools & TTRPGs |
Audits, forks, and pull requests are welcome. Nectar is built to last for the decade, not the quarter. If you find a security issue, please open a private advisory rather than a public issue.