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This is the #97th edition of the "Week through Adrian's Lenses" weekly Hive and crypto news roundup.
Let's see what we have for this week. We cover:
Hive
- Splinterlands
- Stakehouse Den
- VSC
- New Exchange
- Inleo
- Hivemind
- GIFU
- Hive Badges
- Node Operators
- V4V.App
- Holozing
- Immortal Creed
Crypto
- DOGE
- BUIDL
Week on Hive
18 of 26 tracked posts made it to this week's issue of the "Week on Hive" roundup.
In the Spotlight
Spliterlands Ecosystem Updates
Quite a few things happened in and around Splinterlands or connected to it. Let's go into it.
Splinterlands has finished a free-to-play version of the game which allows a player access to many areas of the game than previously and to earn soulbound rewards, without buying a spellbook or anything else. So far it's not in production, but can be tested on the public test server. One needs to request access to the test server if they don't have it from being a Maverick previously, or a big land owner. So, by going through support, anyone can test the new free-to-play version of the game. You can even ask to receive test assets. But to see how this works, you need an account that doesn't have a spellbook.
That and other updates were announced in the most recent release notes.
Blaze, the marketing lead for Splinterlands was invited at The People's Guild, but hasn't disclosed much regarding future marketing plans. I have seen some small marketing pushes on X from SPS DAO, not sure if it's his doing. The new challenges for content creators are coming from him though, and that's a big improvement.
This might be his doing though... Matt has been invited to a X space related to Web3 gaming. I'm listening to it as I type, so I don't know what they talked about yet, but I assume he talked about... Web3 gaming, maybe a little bit of Splinterlands.
That being said, we started to see some small consistent results in November for Splinterlands, besides the significant price increase of SPS. Look at this chart:
Note the red line at the bottom, which is the number of spellbooks purchased. While we don't see a significant increase, we see consistent purchases, every day, unlike before November.
Stakehouse Den: Web3 Social Casino on Arcade Colony
We had an interesting piece of news from the other half of Splinterlands, its wholly-owned subsidiary Invennium: the whitepaper draft for a new platform on Arcade Colony, which will be focused on casino games. Check it out!
I already like MoonKarts on Arcade Colony, too bad it doesn't have game liquidity so I never played a multiplayer game yet. Casino games might attract many players, even if I am not one of them.
Marketing / Awareness / Branding
Great Interview with 
VSC updated its website recently. Still has a few loose ends which will probably be filled in when the mainnet will be launched (in Q1, 2025, according to the website). He also offered an interview recently which is worth watching, in my opinion.
Hive to Have a New Exchange
This is NOT a new exchange listing, but rather an exchange built around Hive and SpendHBD, more or less, from what I understand. They will have an onboarding process to SpendHBD.com (i.e. Hive).
They have deposits and withdrawals to naira (Nigeria's national currency), and are working to do the same for Ghanaian fiat currency. Anyone else will be able to use the exchange as a crypto exchange, without the fiat part.
They say it's 95% to being launched. The announcement is filled with screenshots.
Governance / Development / Dapps / Education
Inleo Very Close to Finishing Dash Integration
They've been talking about it on the Inleo AMA, but also on Chain Chatter, where Joel from Dash (and Hive) was the special guest.
On the AMA they also talked about testing out some in-person marketing (I think it was flyers or something like that).
Do you need a refresher on LEO tokenomics? Here it is.
By the way, today is LEO PowerUp Day (LPUD), for those interested. Potential to win one of the consistent LP delegation prizes for 3-4 weeks for powering up at least 50 LEO, without having powered down in the last 3 months, if you have less than 25k LP.
Hivemind APIs Are Much Faster Now
The Blocktrades team replaced the python code from Hivemind with postgREST SQL, a task that took months of work. At the end, they benchmarked the performance of the new setup to compare it with the old one, and found that the majority of the benchmarked operations are 3-4x faster on average. They still have a few ones they need to tweak. Here's his detailed report (easy to read the comparative speed of operations before and after, even for non-coders).
GIFU For Hive's Winning Meme Coin?
Well, you know how I feel about meme coins... That hasn't changed, lol.
But if GIFU is successful, I don't mind. 😄 Built on BSC, traded mostly on Hive-Engine so far, from what I heard, as SWAP.GIFU. Plus, I like gifs more than I like jpegs... Quite impressive that they have 50k+ token holders already. Read more here if you are interested.
PeakD Badges => Hive Badges
The PeakD team has been working to decentralize their badges and the rules that govern them, and this is the result. Basically, every project, app, or even user can create their own Hive badge.
Split Block Logs
Hive Witness Essentials Major Upgrade
V4V.app Was Hacked
Games
More Details about Holozing Alpha Vials
Immortal Creed at the 1 Year Mark
I don't play the game, but I saw the announcement and believe they deserve the spotlight for making it to 1 year so far. Happy anniversary!
Week in the Crypto World
DOGE Now Has a Seat in Trump's Administration
Elon Musk did it again! But Trump played along or he doesn't care and just wanted to indulge Elon while they are in the "honeymoon period"...
Elon Musk will co-lead together with Vivek Ramaswamy the Department of Government Efficiency, i.e. DoGE. I'm not eating my words about meme coins, but DOGE may be from another movie... Yeah, check this out!
BlackRock Moving Faster than Competition in Crypto
On a serious note, Blackrock has the largest Bitcoin ETF, but they also develop other products directly on crypto infrastructure. Their institution-focused stablecoin built on Ethereum (BUIDL), launched in March, is moving to other 5 EVMs: Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism's OP Mainnet, and Polygon. Word is they are discussing with other lending platforms in crypto to make BUIDL the default collateral on their platforms. Read more...
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