Today I saw this post about buying lunch in a restaurant in Sucre, where the author paid in HBD. As readers will know I am quite interested in tracking any possible trend of adoption of Hive/HBD out there, and I took a look at the pub/restaurant's account.
While relatively new, the restaurant has regularly been receiving customers paying for lunch/dinner in HBD for the past 2 months.
This got me thinking, is there any way we can actually track the use of HBD for paying for goods and services? So I ran a query on transfers per day, and also the accounts that make and receive the most transfers in the last 2 years. I found that the vast majority of HBD transfers fall into 4 categories: Exchange deposits and withdrawals, delegation rewards, hbdstabilizer/hive.fund and dust transfers (usually to convey a message in the memo). I spent some time identifying the accounts that operate as exchanges and delegation rewards, and also filtered out transfers of 0.01 or less.
I then manually looked through the remaining transfers and determined that yes, the rest are mostly payments for digital services between Hivers. A small minority represent in-person goods and services (for example I saw the word "comida" occasionally).
Here is the result.
Overall, while there might be some tiny recent bump, it's not so interesting. Between 200 and 300 such service transfers every day since the split from Steem, no meaningful trend either up or down.
However, I also summed up the value of these payments for services, and then a couple of things do start to jump out.
Firstly the value of service payments really started to jump in mid 2021, despite the fact that they didn't really increase in number (so probably a small minority of transfers represent the bulk of the value).
Secondly, we are seeing a lot more value being transferred quite recently. Despite the bear market, the 30 day average of values is almost as high as it has ever been, particularly since the start of April. Incidentally, that's about the same timeframe as we have been seeing retail services in Sucre begin to accept HBD. I'm not quite ready to conclude that is the underlying cause, but I thought I would share this little curiosity anyway before I head to sleep.
Edit: I want to note that it's possible I have failed to account for something. I've done a little more this morning to remove things that are not the purchases of goods/services, but the trend and conclusion are pretty much unchanged. Also, the vast majority of these "goods and services" are digital services provided online. The actual in-person payments are a minority, but still significant. The overall scale is small potatoes, but it has to start somewhere.
Here is the value chart on log scale.
