A month ago I mentioned that one would need roughly 28% more stake to reclaim the lost ground generated by the last fork when it came to curation rewards. The vote values during the last hard fork all took a hefty knock and noticed the vote value I once had of 9.54 HIVE drop to a 7.74 HIVE value. I mentioned in order to get back to those previous vote value levels one would have to grow their stake by roughly 25-30%.
Those that follow me know that one of my growth indicators that I use is the HIVE vote value and not just the stake growing. This afternoon I have to admit I did not expect to see the HIVE vote value bouncing back to 8.3 HIVE which is a 0.56 HIVE gain from 4 weeks ago and gives me some hope that this may not take a good 18-24 months to recover the 1.6 vote vale from November last year. The difference is only 1.24 HIVE which may be doable in the next 6 months. The HIVE vote value is never quite stable and does tend to fluctuate around quite a bit so it is more of a growth guide and this does impact your direct growth and why it is important to be aware of its value.
The vote value is extremely important as it helps those you curate grow through your support whilst growing your own account through the 50/50 split. This is why delegating the bulk of your stake is not necessarily a smart way to grow and are doing your own growth a disservice. It is noble to support a project and there is nothing wrong with those intentions but you need to keep the bulk of it to grow your own account whilst supporting others in the community. If everyone delegated the bulk of their stake then it would seriously impact the growth of the HIVE community.
What I find worrying is the HIVE APR sitting at 4.13% after it was 4.16% earlier today. This is great for earning the extras if you have your HIVE staked as Hive Power as this is roughly 1.13% above the benchmark APR of 3%. This is where the APR tends to hover around so this is definitely not normal and why I have my concerns. Extra HIVE being earned is just adding to the overall inflation and in the long term this cannot be considered a good thing. With my current stake this is worth 21.5 HIVE daily and is by far the most I have ever earned on HIVE via the APR. Under normal conditions of a 3% APR this is worth an extra 6 HIVE per day which is bitter sweet really due to the inflation not being a positive result.
For those growing their HIVE accounts this is most likely the easiest growth period you will encounter and why I urge you to stat active being consistent over these crazy times. If you do not see this as the perfect growth opportunity then you are missing out and will never understand what a great time this is. I used to miss these days when we were at $0.40c as the cheap HIVE just enables you to grow that much quicker with post rewards offering more HIVE.