I like Hive but its taken me a while to really get behind it. Let's face it, blogging isn't exactly hot tech and it seems like a very insular community. A bunch of people writing about HIVE isn't going to bring the ETH crowd running in.
However, a few things have changed recently for me. Four things to be exact.
- Arcade Colony
- Leo Ads
- Serfdom and Sorcery
- The mood around here
Let's go over them.
Arcade Colony
If you don't follow Splinterlands very closely, you may not know what this is. Arcade Colony is likely the savior of the Splinterlands economy because its how the team can make money without selling more assets to the community for profit. Eventually I expect all new assets coming out will burn DEC/SPS and that will change the economy completely.
But Arcade Colony could also be the best thing to ever happen to Hive. AC is a platofrm the team is building that will allow 3rd party game developers to take web 2 games built with Unity/Unreal Engine and port them directly into being web 3 games.
Many developers would love to make web 3 games they have to spend more time trying to make it work on a blockchain than they do making the game. Aggy said the first potential partner they are working with has 60 million downloads of their games.
Right now Splinterlands is the biggest thing going on Hive and I'm pretty sure they have like 10k real players. What a few games suddenly port over between them we suddenly have 100k new users of hive?
Leo Ads
Who else remembers when facebook when public with billions od active users and Wall Street fell all over themselves to say that Facebook couldn't monetize it. So many people were so sure there was no way to do it.
What did facebook do? They showed ads to billions of people and instantly became one of the richest companies in the world. Shocked right? They used a tried and true business model and got rich.
LEO will never be facebook, LEO has been around for years and has fewer monthly active users than I went to high school with. But, with Leo threads, those people are looking at thousands of ads and that revenue is holding up the price of LEO. And this makes LEO one of the few crypto projects with actual revenue holding the price up.
Its not much now but we know that in a bull market two thigns will happen. One, more users will come around. And two, the price of running crypto ads will go way up. And that means the earning for displaying ads will go way up. And that means suddenly LEO has legs. And what happens when crypto gets legs in a bull makret? Even mroe people come running in. Maybe even thousands of people who are just discovering hive because of Arcade Colony.
Serfom & Sorcery
Who knows what S&S is?
A couple months ago, the team from Psyber-X decided to build a side project on their Discord. It was just a simple text based game that used a new hive level 2 token called $DBLN. All it was supposed to be was a side project to get a bit more activity going on the discord. If you're on discord you know that most crypto project discords are dead right now.
In a few weeks, and with no marketing that I saw, this side project outgrew Psyber-X (that took a year to build and market).
This happened even while the bot needed to run the game was so buggy that it was probably down more than it was up. It happened as each new feature broke half the players accounts and had to be manually fixed by a very overworked team. It happened when there was actually very little game to even play. Just a few commands and not much else.
Within a month, other discords were putting the game on their servers. It's now on a bunch of them.
And you know what's amazing? Not only is the discord chat going nonstop, but its actually a really pleasant place to be. Even with all the bugs and glitches, I don't think I've seen anyone get truly angry about anything. Everyone is accepting. When something breaks its laughed off. Its not toxic.
They have hit on something here. And that something could spread to hundreds of other discords. And that thing they hit on is built on Hive. If you haven't gone over to their discord yet to give them some love, you should.
(I don't know if there's an affiliate program but if it asks and you're feeling gracious, my ign is imnomimno)
They are working for all of us.
And that leads me perfectly into my last thing that makes me bullish on Hive
The Mood Around Here
Spinterlands right now is 90% trolls. Splinterlands is not unique. Pick a project or blockchain (besides S&S) and its almost all trolls at this point. But not Hive. Most of Hive is pretty positive at this point. And we have a platform where talking to each other is built in.
Maybe its that pumping bags is a good way to get an upvote. Maybe it's that Hive allows people who don't have a lot of money to be involved in crypto. Maybe it's that there's no company or board to get angry at. I don't really know what it is but for some reason, the general mood around here and I believe that's going to pay off down the road.
My New Milestone
With my current feelings (and because I finally realized I could buy Hive using Simpleswap), I've been increasing my stake in Hive and Leo.
Still small potatoes but with crossing 3250 HP, today I had my first ever day of curation rewards breaking 1 hive. 1.01 hive to be exact.
I'm going to have to build up a little more stake to make it consistent but it happened and that makes me want to stack a whole lot more.
And I intend to do just that.
As for outside money, I'm going to try to buy in 1000 hive per month if it stays at this price. Also, while I get about .5 hive daily for my dCrop holdings, according to their website, my account is currently worth 4200 HIVE. So I am looking at selling that and staking the hive. If its liquid enough, that could put me at around 10k HP in a few months.
I've been told 10k is a magic number when the account really starts to feel like its snowballing. I like magic. So the goal now is to have 10k HP by the end of the year, if not closer to 15k.