What is the reason behind the recent spike in HIVE?
Price action is always a reflection of market sentiment on certain asset. We all know that crypto markets are volatile so you can get high pumps and really deep lows on a really short time interval. That being said, and noticing that this is not financial advice, Hive is a project that was launched on March 20th, 2020, the main reasons for the recent price Spike were.
Despite it being a fork of the previous Steem blockchain, in this small period people on the crypto space have noticed the positive shift made by the Hive community and the decentralized management on Hive development and user experience.
Hive fork locked in a account managed by the blockchain code (Decentralized Hive Fund -DHF) the premined stake that Steemit INC have been mismanaging over the last four years (around 20% of total supply). This funds are now allocated to any developers or community members who submits a proposal to be voted (stake weighted votes, only Hive staked are counted thus preventing Malicious parties to just buy lots of Hive and voting) by any Hive account who has some Hive staked. If the proposal pass a dynamic benchmark (set by the community) it gets funded using the DHF.
Since it is a very young project, Hive just recently got listed in three major exchanges (Binance, Huobi, MXC) and the volume spiked because of this listings. Previously Hive only was trading on Bittrex, Ionomy and other small exchanges, true price discovery had not occurred until those listings took place.
The last actions taken by Steemit INC on the Steem blcokchain signaled red flags to every crypto investor and the market in general. The most harmful ones were the centralization of Steem Block Producers (on Steem and Hive jargon they are called witnesses), compromising the very purpose of the distributed ledger (now Steem is better to be thought of as a centralized database) by effectively controlling who gets the top 20 spots (the ones effectively controlling the chain) using the premined stake to vote in block producers who align with Steemit INC's narrative and voting out those who oppose. Also, the censorship of accounts who post voicing opinions contrary of those of Steemit INC. Finally, the froze of over 13 million (around 2.5 million $ at market price) from big stakeholders who supported the Hive fork by blocking these big stakeholders accounts from unstaking or transferring their Steem Balance (this can be labeled as a desperate measure to prevent big stakeholders to dump their Steem on the way out to investing on Hive).