How much has Hive tried to create more buzz around the ecosystem through various methods without much success?
The continuous developments at the core level and the ecosystem have largely been unnoticed for a long time. Participating to conferences while was important for creating some connections, it didn't really produce anything measurable. Sponsorships have sometimes been controversial, and while some at least left something behind others haven't really. Marketing hasn't often been as successful as we would have expected.
But some things have an impact. Distriator shows it is possible to make people aware of Hive, spend and earn our coin HBD and grow the network of businesses participating in the program, especially in areas hit by economic hardship. And that in a decentralized manner, mostly.
The partnership between Dash & Inleo and their joint marketing efforts also showed some interesting results.
Not long after that, we have this wave of CEX listings either for HIVE on spot (Hotcoin), or on a number of CEXes starting with Binance as a perpetual futures contract HIVE-USDT.
Screenshot from CMC.
If the timeline of events is clear in my mind, we first had the Upbit pump (which made HIVE reach the spotlight of top gainers and on very good volume - by the way, second time in a row we hit the spotlight on an Upbit pump), and then we had the announcement from Binance about the perpetual futures contract.
The announcements of the introduction of perpetual futures contracts by various CEXes (I suspect all or most of them are based on Binance liquidity, so they follow closely the moves Binance makes) probably interfered with the typical downward price action post pump. Note that these actions are not the same in the bull market and in the bear market, with the bear market ones being way easier to predict on the way down.
The CEXes are incentivized to list HIVE either on spot or on perpetual futures, since on the high volumes we have during such events and the huge volatility, they gain. On spot however, they need liquidity, and that only happens if there are additional incentives for people to trade there. Like... no KYC. That probably is why the new HIVE listing on Hotcoin has a decent volume. Curiously, this exchange doesn't load for me at this time.
So... we could have seen the tendency to defend higher price levels for HIVE after these events like 35 cents or even higher, which would have meant gains of 40-50% in a very short while as we get ready to enter the final year of the bull market, and that on a counter-trend, since the market was mostly red and continues to be. Since the pump, the price of HIVE is totally unlinked from what's been going on in the crypto market.
Nothing else we did before moved the needle so much and so quickly as it did being in the spotlight for top gainers on a good volume and then the announcements of listings. Even though many other things would have deserved to get more attention from the market.
With that in mind, there is the potential listing on Coinbase which may or may not happen for HIVE. For now, we only dealt with one of the prerequisites, so there was not even a talk about listing. But looking at what happened these days, seems like such a listing would make a huge splash after all, as much as I personally prefer to avoid CEXes when I can.
Someone said in a comment on one of my previous post that we should make Hive the best meme from SocialFi. While I dislike the association with meme coins, I agree that these kind of pumps will attract the kind of of people (and capital) that is involved in that space. But most of them would definitely come for the price action, very few for the utility.