Venezuela - Hive's Most Established National Community
Anyone who spends just a bit of time exploring or curating on Hive will have noticed that there are a lot of Venezuelans here. Past estimates have suggested that Venezuelans represent upwards of 30% of the userbase in an otherwise widely distributed global community.
Why is the Venezuelan community so large compared to any other? Venezuela is a large country, but it's only just about in the top 50 worldwide, so that alone would not be enough to rank them at the top by virtue of natural distribution.
In this post I will take a look at some key statistics which explain how the Venezuelan community got so large on Hive by comparing them to other national communities, and then I will make an attempt to interpret what those statistics likely reflect in terms of the real world story of Venezuela on Hive.
The stats in this post only reflect users who set a location in their profile. This is a subset of all users in a country, I estimate that the full set of users in any country is 3-5 times larger than those that include their location
Users, Onboarding and Retention
The chart below shows the counts of active authors and curators with a location identified as Venezuela, since the hard fork from Steem in March 2020.
As can be seen, there was a period of fast growth particularly in 2021 during the last Hive bull market. This sort of stilted growth is common in Hive as well as the crypto space broadly - growth typically is highly connected to token price (whichever direction of causality), so rapid growth may be seen in bull markets and then continued activity is largely a matter of how well the network continues to retain users during the following bear market. It's worth noting also though, that the Venezuelan community on Hive was growing also during 2020 - which mostly represented a bear market for Hive. Since the 2021 bull market, Hive has retained an active userbase of over 1000 monthly authors and over 1500 monthly curators - though again the full Venezuelan userbase is probably 3 to 5 times larger.
Below is the chart of how many active Venezuelan authors per month proceeded to make another post in the next month.
Speaking of retention, since the beginning of Steem low retention has been a problem across the network. In the early days, monthly retention of authors was as low as 40%, hovering around 50% for most of the Steem era, but improving in the years since and now the network-wide retention rate is about 70%.
You may already be noticing that the retention in Venezuela is better than that. This could potentially just be due to users who put a location in their profile being more committed than average, and thus more likely to stay. To determine that, I created another chart below which shows the 6 month rolling average of retention rates, for 5 of the top regions on Hive. Cuba, the USA, Nigeria and Philippines are all included with faded colors for comparison with Venezuela.
As we can see, Venezuela consistently leads the pack when it comes to user retention. It has been above 75% since the 2020 hard fork, and typically is around 80% or more. On average, a Venezuelan user is 12% more likely to stay every month than a user from the USA, and that has a cumulative effect over the long run. It's also worth noting that during the break away fork from Steem to Hive in March 2020, a much larger proportion of Venezuelan users stuck with Hive - a Venezuelan author was 58% more likely to stay with Hive in the month after the hard fork than an American user (the comparison with South Korean users shall be left unsaid).
The two aspects of growth are on-boarding new users and retention, so let's also look at newly active authors as well.
Venezuela also dwarfs all other national communities when it comes to on-boarding new users. The second largest, Nigeria, only beat Venezuela on 3 months in 2022, but usually does not come close. When you combine this much larger user on-boarding with substantially better than average retention, it is no wonder that Venezuela is the largest community here on Hive.
Hive Venezuela in the Real World
That is the story in statistics, but numbers alone are not an explanation. We then must ask why the Venezuelan community achieves these numbers on Hive. I suppose the following answers.
Market Fit
Venezuela is a country with a unique history and a unique experience with systems of money. Hyperinflation has been a rampant problem in the last decade, and as such it is a market crying out for a better monetary system. It's very difficult to earn a living with a regular salary, so Hive provides a way for Venezuelans to supplement their income in a stable way. Getting money in and out of the country is also very difficult, and Hive can help with that.
The good market fit makes it easier to find amenable users in Venezuela, and likely contributes to the higher retention rates there too, because while Hive can be very compelling and interesting to people in other countries, the impact it can have on people's lives is higher in Venezuela.
Community Outreach (Legwork)
The outreach with meetups and events of the Hive community in Venezuela is unparalleled. The dedication and efforts made all the time are incredibly impressive.
This outreach is likely what has translated into the continuous flow of new users from Venezuela on Hive, even during bear markets.
Stakeholder Support
In the last couple of years the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF) has matured into something that allows the Hive community, especially with the support of larger stakeholders, to direct resources towards those efforts that help the network grow and develop and keep us going during the crypto winter.
Support from stakeholders through the DHF may have a multiplier effect, increasing the effectiveness of the efforts made by Hivers to go out and promote the network, bring in new users and keep our established users engaged.
Conclusion
The Venezuelan community on Hive is much larger than any other, and we can see how it got to this point with a much higher on-boarding rate as well as better retention than the network has generally. We can understand this growth in terms of an especially good market fit for Hive in the region, as well as the efforts made by Venezuelan Hivers and the support they have gotten from stakeholders in the network.
If you've gotten this far, thank you for reading and I hope you found something interesting here. I have had an interest in the match between Venezuela and crypto since before Steem let alone Hive even existed. I earnestly believe that the future of crypto will emerge out of Latin America, especially Venezuela, and it has been fascinating to watch it grow from an interesting possibility into a motivated community that we can see here on Hive.
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