A CUB GROWING HIS MANE IN THE PRIDE: MY FIRST #LPUD PARTICIPATION!

For anyone that has long term plans on Hive, one of your top goals should be growing your stake. How do we do that? Well, we do that by powering up and locking our tokens.

images taken from leofinace.io and pexels and cover designed by me in canva
As a young wild lion exploring the jungle of Hive in his very new days, part of my Hive goals is to grow not just my Hive Power, but my Leo Power with it. There are many advantages I have identified that incentivizes and motivates me to do this. I’ll talk about some of them in this writing.

I am a very active engager and wondering around Hive one of these days, I came across a post by Hive account@cmplxty talking about his Noticeable Leo Progress. Here, what interested me in particular was the parts where he talked about his plans to increase his Leo Power so he could further reduce his voting power per vote, while still distributing good votes and earning good curation rewards. I haven’t been around long, but I think I can spot a good investment when I see one, and that is precisely what I see in the Leo Token.

So, I did what any curious and inquisitive person would do. Ask! I asked in his(Hive account@cmplxty) comments how to exchange some of my HBD for Leo. His Reply was a detailed tutorial covering how to buy HIVE with my HBD, how to move the Hive to Hive engine, how to swap or buy LEO with my HIVE on hiveengine and finally how to stake or power up my Leo on the LPUD today. I honestly thought his answer would come in the form of a post where he would tag me, but he managed to explain it in a comment in an ever so understandable way even for a beginner. And might I add that all this was from memory!! I did everything and was able to purchase 147LEO with 20HIVE, waiting for today to finally stake.

I have to admit though, I found it kind of odd that LPUD was on the 15th of the month. It’s an outlier from all the power up days I know(so far). But then I guess that also makes it stand out from the other PUDs. Now into why I’m staking some leo!

Why Is This Newbie Trying To Build His Stake In The Pride?

Putting it in a very simple way, I’m building my Leo Stake for the same reason both you and build our Hive Stake or make investments in general. Because I believe in the Leo community’s long term growth. However this is not enough. There must be other reasons. Well of course there are!

• Curation Rewards: This is probably the number 1 reason why people stake their coins- to earn curation rewards. On the Hive blockchain, people with higher stake earn greater curation rewards than small fishes. The higher your stake, the bigger your curation rewards. It just makes sense.

• Following and More Recognition: I don’t plan to just be a writer on Hive, I want to be one with a good following. Giving good upvotes is a pretty good incentive to gain followers fast so increasing my Leo stake in a way is me trying to gain more of a following in the Lion Family.

• Diversification: Putting all your eggs in one basket is a very bad idea. It is good to diversify your portfolio to spread both your risk and your potential returns. Instead of leaving everything as Hive Power, I’m simply choosing to diversify by converting part of my Hive into Leo Power. After all, we’re all still the same Hive community at large.

• More Influence over the reward pool: from what I know so far, the more Leo Power you have, the more influence you have over who gets what amount of Leo from the reward pool and who doesn’t. Through upvotes and downvotes, you’re able to determine using your voting power how much value you believe an author is bringing to the community by upvoting or how much harm they’re causing by downvoting.

Most people don’t talk about the downvotes, but it is essential just as much as upvotes are in the fight against plagiarism and abuse. I want to be able to better support my friends and overall quality content in the Leo finance community.

Now My Staking

For the sake of my colleague newbies, I’ll demonstrate how I powered up. You can see from my LEO wallet(you can find your LEO wallet by logging onto leofinance.io and heading to Wallet) that I had 147 LEO before powering up. I’ll be powering up all my LEO.

If you check the options next to the Leo Tokens (LEO), you can either send(first option with Telegram-looking icon), Trade on Leodex(Second Icon with chart-looking icon), or Power Up(third option represented by two arrows pointing up). I think we know which one I’m selecting. Great!

Once you click Power Up, you get this pop up which is the next step. Here, you enter the account you wish to power up for or send the Leo Power to. In my case, I’m powering up for myself so I leave it the default setting, and I enter the amount of LEO I’ll be powering up(147). After all that is done, hit Continue.

Then it brings me to this Hive signer page to confirm or sign the transaction. You do this with your active Key. I tap Continue again.

Hitting Continue brings you here to sign into Hivesigner. Hit Continue a third time after you enter your username and Hivesigner password.

So funny thing, I actually hadn’t imported my active key into Hivesigner yet so I got a prompt to import my master or active key, I instead went back my mistake and when the page reloaded, Hivesigner was asking for my username and active key now. So I entered them and Hit Continue. Then it prompted me to enter my Hivesigner password again, which I did, and then on to the final step.

On the next page, I hit approve in the green color down there, and I get redirected back to my LEO wallet. At first, it didn’t show my LEO power until I refreshed the page again and you can see now I have 147LP.

Yh so this is how it’s done. If there’s a much simpler way to do it, maybe an oldie can drop some tips. Have an awesome LPUD!

All screenshots for this post were taken from Hivesigner and Leofincance.io on my laptop