Wow, 5 years as a surviving crypto project seems like a lifetime these days. So many projects come and go, some have flourished and have become big names in the space, and some of us have just held on for dear life while trying to build the best use cases for this magical internet money as we can.
It's Been a Hard Fought Journey
In a world where airdrops reward people for virtually nothing, it's been a hard road to build our our e-commerce platform, because it requires people to actually try and build their own businesses. But if we are to ever win the battle with the traditional economy, we have to start somewhere! We started with the classifieds network that eventually was built out on-chain via Hive-Engine, then came the eBay style store that seemed to get a great start, but none of the vendors wanted to follow through and actually promote their own items and stores on the Hivelist Store, and we don't have the funds to market it on our own. We hoped that the community and LIST stakeholders would help us support such a use case to help build the value in the ecosystem, but that really never happened.
The way the industry has gone, is that people only care about pumping their own fiat based bags with pump and dump scheme, instead of trying to build out a value based business using crypto payments.
We still see that one day, people will wake up to the absolute need for cryptocurrencies in their everyday life and business, not just as an investment, but as a usable currency. We have always believed in using cryptocurrencies to build an alternative economy, and we still stand by those original principals and are motivated now more than ever to build out what we have been striving to build for the last 5 years.
Sure we have been inconsistent with posting and keeping the community up to date on things, but that has come from a lack of motivation to be perfectly honest. But we are hoping that with some new functionality we are building out, it will help reignite the passion and we can extend that passion out to the community and get more people involved in building their own businesses on our platform!
The Motivation To Continue
One of the biggest motivations to not just shut down and close the doors has been that we have been pretty much sanctioned as an official project on Hive by getting listed on the Hive.io Ecosystem page, but also just recently added to the ecosystem page on Hive 
Continued Building For the Next 5 Years
Even with the struggles we have had over the years, we have survived and are somehow in the black (don't ask me how, but it happened) and now are hoping to really start thriving! We are building out some awesome functionality that we have always wanted to build out, and rebuilding some older functionalities to work with the new stuff! Some things we have already instituted into the platform like our Hive Keychain Login plugin for Wordpress, the HBD Payment plugin with Hive Keychain, that works with tandom with the login plugin, so it's a smooth process!
We are also getting ready to bring back the multivendor store solution that will be even better than before now that we have the better HIve integrations. The sign up process to be a store vendor will be based on LIST staking and a small fee paid in LIST that we are hoping to have going soon as soon as we work out some kinks in working with the Hive Engine API. The plan is to have this automatically burn the sign up fee LIST, taking those tokens out of circulation. This helps drive value in the LIST token!
Another cool thing that we do have working in the background and are going to start testing out soon is the new auction function! So now, vendors will be able to setup eBay style auctions and not just sell for a fixed price! Right now it's set up were the product is an auction only, but working on 'Buy Now' price features similar to how eBay's is setup.
Everything is Now All Under One Domain!
Our little piece-mill project has taken on different forms over the years when it comes to sites and domains. At one point, we operated under 3 domains. Actually for much of the project's lifespan. Last year, we finally dumped the hivelist.store domain and incorporated it into the main hivelist.io domain as a sub domain. And now, actually just last week, we incorporated our Hive-Engine Outpost (the on-chain side of things), into the main domain with it's own subdomain! All menus have been changed to reflect this as well! The Hivelist.org domain is now dead!
So now the main info is on:
https://hivelist.io
The store lives at:
https://store.hivelist.io
The Hive-Engine Classifieds, NFT Market, and Swap Pools are all at:
https://app.hivelist.io
So we now have everything under one roof! Digitally speaking, haha.
Expanding Beyond Hive
We are looking to continue to build out services for communities beyond the Hive ecosystem, as is with other projects like InLeo. We have been working on payment solutions for the store for various cryptocurrencies that do not rely on any third party for payment processing like BTCPay, BitPay, or other solutions like that.
We currently have direct solutions for HBD and EVM based stablecoins, Bitcoin, Monero, and Litecoin. We are also working on other privacy focused chains like DASH and ZEC that are or will be available to trade for HBD on LeoDex along with BTC and LTC. For Monero, we will have to use solutions like StealthEx or Simpleswap to move Monero into Hive/HBD to pay out to vendors. We are also working on some solutions to auto-split payments to let vendors be paid in these currencies as well and save the exchange fees on the backend.
With this, we have been considering a rebrand. Maybe not even a rebrand, but once we have all this awesome functionality built out, we may use it and build out another marketplace under a different brand, not sure yet. But for now, we are going to keep things the way they are when it comes to the branding.
So we have a bunch of things going on with expanding payment options for our vendors once we reopen our multivendor side of things!
Here's to Another 5 Years!
This is all to say that stuff is actually happening in the background, even though we have been pretty quiet on the update front! We still believe in building out an alternative economy, and even though we haven't garnered the support we were looking for at first, we have learned a ton, and learned to also not give up! So here's to another 5 years of building out e-commerce use cases for the blockchain and the overall alternative economy!
Keep calm and Hive on!
An E-Commerce Solution For A Cryptocurrency Based Economy
Web 3 Classifieds Network | NFT Marketplace | DEFI Pool | Crypto Payment Only Retail Store
Powered by the Hive Blockchain and Hive-Engine