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This is the #124th 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
- Hive Retention
- POSH & GOSH
- Hive Hub in Guatemala
- Distriator Loan
- Hive Debit
- Hive-Engine Fees
- NFTMart
- dCity, Rising Star
- Splinterforge
- Splinterlands
- Moon
- Rising Star
Crypto
- Bitcoin
- Stablecoins
Week on Hive
14 of 29 tracked posts made it to this week's issue of the "Week on Hive" roundup. A couple of them may be cross-posted in the Hive News community without being included in this news roundup.
In the Spotlight
How's Hive Retention?
The immediate response that would come to someone's mind would be... bad, right?
Want to see some concrete data? How about some charts?
A disclaimer first: I know this is work-in-progress, so I'm not sure if there are any inaccuracies.
Here's what I discovered in the Swarm of Swarms of this week, under development by 
There is a link too.
Provided the data is accurate at this time, when analyzed by activity, we had a retention of only 8.9% for the new users in 2024 (which is not THAT awful, by the way), but... here's the fantastic thing: that rose to 22.8% in 2025. There is also a "super retained" category, which I don't know what it means by comparison to the other categories, but that is at 1.1% in 2024 and 0.8% in 2025.
From the list of users analyzed, it includes alts, which would make perfect candidates for being "super retained" since someone already heavily involved on Hive creates them for a specific purpose and with the intention of using them.
There is also a "retention by HP" category, which I assume measures if the respective accounts added some HP. That is 0.3% for older accounts from 2024 (they had time to earn some Hive, I suppose), and still 0.0% for the accounts from 2025.
Again, I'm not sure if these numbers are accurate at this point, but maybe we find out and I thought it was important to draw attention to them.
A jump from 9% to 23% in active new members (retained) from 2024 to 2025 would be impressive! Sure, the bull market might help, but HIVE price hasn't really soared except at the beginning of the year for a short while, and nowadays, still timidly for the time being.
Marketing / Awareness / Branding / Meetings
POSH & GOSH Going to the Next Level
The two projects will use Snaps to either let the curation team know of your proof of shares (other than on Reddit and BlueSky, which are taken care of automatically), or to "boost" other Hive-related posts on Web2. Read the details here. It might be easier to watch the HivePosh Snaps and see how others are doing it (but note there is an anti-spam rule).
Who Wants to Go to the Tropics? :)
Here's a video presentation of 
Happy Customer Supermarket Took a Loan
That title probably wouldn't be a surprise to anyone if we were talking about a "standard" supermarket and a "standard" loan.
But nothing is standard about this. As you may have read before, this is a supermarket opened in a space the owner rented or purchased to start a business using Hive earnings, and since it had extra space, it turned that space into a supermarket, one with personality as you may have seen (and tied to Hive).
The loan itself is not "standard" either. It is a loan via Hive, offered by 
Governance / Development / Dapps / Education
Do You Want to Print Receipts of Invoices for Hive Debit Cards?
No problem... if you have a PoS that can print your card info and receipts for invoices. Businesses probably have or could have something like this, don't they? Here are the details.
Hive-Engine Adding Fees to Non-Human Users, In Two Stages
Fees were initially announced in one stage and on a short notice. That changed after some discussions/reactions.
BEED fees will be paid by anyone who does multiple transactions per block (this is not humans, but can be bots or apps, regardless of the good or bad intentions of their owner).
The last update was that these fees will be initially applied on market transactions (since May 28th), but all multi-tx transactions will incur fees starting from roughly the end of September.
Reason given for this change was to discourage bot owners purposely spamming Hive-Engine to slow it down or worse, bringing it to a halt.
As a direct result of this, NFTMart decided to shut down its operations (it's true, after they've been in maintenance-only for a few months).
dCity and Rising Star will be impacted as well, we learned from their discords. We will see if the delayed second stage gives them time to adapt without jeopardizing ops.
Not sure if this was directly connected, since the announcement preferred to say they no longer have the time to develop it further, but Splinterforge will also be closed down. The owners invite willing parties to take over the code base, smart contracts, accounts, discord, domain names, etc. if they want to continue. Details on their discord.
Games
New Skill-Based Tournament Series in Splinterlands
The new Scholar Showcase Tournament Series have been announced recently. Why it matters? Scholars can have access to cards at the same level and these tournaments should be skill-based only. There will be a reward split between them and card owners, and everything is facilitated by an interface created by a community member. Check this out!
Speaking of this interface being built by a community member, if you like Splinterlands, you should follow the member building it: 
The Chase of Moons
Looks like Moon entered a new phase: chasing moon creation. In the meantime, the parameters for debris fields have been changed to give a massive advantage to fleeters, but also an uptick in the games of chances to defenders looking for a moon. However, the balance needs to be restored... Update: While I was writing this post the settings were restored to their default (as they were at the beginning of the game: 30% from fleet, 0% from defense).
Rising Star Utils Celebrates 1 Year...
... and I just discovered this useful tool for Rising Star. Maybe you missed it too? Either way, I read there are some prizes involved for the anniversary.
Week in the Crypto World
Bitcoin Pushed Mainstream
Texas, one of the most influential US states, voted a bill (both Senate and House voted for) to create a Strategic Reserve containing any crypto above $500bn market cap over the previous 12-months period (currently, only BTC fits this description, but at the top of the bull market, ETH might too). Of course, this needs to be signed by the governor into law to become effective.
Top banks are moving in too. Both JPM and Morgan Stanley, two banks with over $6.3 trillion AUM, will start to offer spot Bitcoin ETFs. I learned of both news from 
Stablecoin Space Will Heat Up
The same JPM and Morgan Stanley, together with BoFA, CITI, and Wells Fargo, have started to talk about launching their own join stablecoin venture. They have their eyes peeled for the Genius Act before they will act.
Now I really want a dip (at least in September, if not sooner), because these guys and others like them (and their clients) may make these prices look cheap in the fall.
List of Older "Week through Adrian's Lenses" posts
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