HIVE is on fire, isn't it? Fantastic! Isn't it what we've all be waiting for? 😀
Most likely a good part of this intense activity in both volatility and volume can be attributed to recent listings, and we had 2 new spot listings (BitPanda, particularly interesting for the Europeans, and Hotcoin without KYC) and a number of futures listings, mainly on Binance. But we should keep in mind that we had a very good volume even before the listings, especially during the intense Upbit activity, which may have been a major factor that contributed to the decisions to list us in the other places or with additional products (Binance also has HIVE on Binance Earn with a huge APR to suck in as much liquidity as they can).
I don't think these are the only factors in my opinion. Recent developments and partnerships from Inleo drew attention, in my opinion. Maybe they wouldn't have, if they weren't promoted quite intensely, and linked to an old and well-known community in crypto, Dash. Some who dug deeper maybe have seen the transactions on LeoDex started to pick up, being the 3rd interface on Maya by volume, and an easy to use one. And it is linked to Hive, obviously, which the others are not. I don't know if someone from the CEXes considered LeoDex (or VSC markets) as potential growing rivals in the future for Hive (with all the focus on DEXes), but I'm sure they want liquidity to stay on CEXes for the fees.
It seems like the time to ignore HIVE has passed, and the time to race for it has come. Who would have thought a short while ago that CEXes would start racing to list HIVE? Maybe they should pay us to list us, lol. That will never happen, of course... Just making fun of that practice of theirs.
Anyway, that aside, let's go to the point of this post.
Although in practice I have fewer options by using only the internal market from Hive and Hive-Engine than on something like Binance, that's what I did and keep doing. I know how unpredictable development and testing cycles are in programming, but VSC may be losing some great opportunities of free marketing and probably quite intense usage at the beginning of this year. But maybe they wouldn't want to stress test the network as much from the beginning anyway.
With all the usefulness of LeoDex as a Hive bridge to other ecosystems, I checked today if I could use it to arbitrage HBD, when it goes out of peg, like it was a few days ago at 1.18. Nope, it can't be used, not with this liquidity and fees anyway! Today HBD is around 1.05, but when trying to see how much USDC or USDT would I get for it, the fees (i.e. mostly slippage, I think) are astronomical.
On Hive-Engine there are no real stablecoins listed (with a deep liquidity too) besides HBD, to be able to make such a move. There was SWAP.BUSD, but that coin is dead. There is BEED (the stable coin of Hive Engine), but it is at its beginnings, and has no real liquidity. There is DEC, but can't be trusted to hold its peg either, since it's not a real stablecoin. No SWAP.USDC, no SWAP.USDT, no SWAP.DAI, etc. They would come handy in times like these. And helpful to quicker stabilize HBD, if they have some liquidity. Of course, Hive-Engine is also a CEX, but it's kind of our CEX, until we have a second layer DEX.
EDIT: Looks like there is SWAP.USDT, which is good to know! I just didn't find it because I was looking for direct pairs to SWAP.HBD. This would have to go through SWAP.HIVE, but still, a decent option, if SWAP.USDT holds its peg better than HBD on the short term. Something that needs some observations.
That's one of the big shortcomings I noticed. Converting HBD to HIVE doesn't help since that is a slow mechanism, unlike the trade swings that happen at these moments. HBD doesn't even have CEX listings, apart from Upbit, which makes arbitraging it quite difficult I imagine in situations like these.
The internal market on Hive is less active than on CEXes (Binance mostly, since Upbit is closed for most people), but for small-to-medium amounts of HIVE traded is still kind of acceptable, if one wants to avoid CEXes. However, liquidity is better than in the past, so things have improved from then to now. For high amounts of HIVE, one either needs to be very patient or to use the slow conversion mechanism (probably not a good idea during times of high volatility).
We don't have complex derivatives on Hive-related platforms yet - like tokenized RWA, bonds, functional lending and collateralization, advanced liquidity pools, futures, leverage, margin trading, etc. - and we see ecosystems that have such advanced platforms attract a lot of capital and attention. On chain I mean (second layer is fine), rather than on CEXes, related to their chain. So... I don't know how much can be built on VSC and how long it would take for everything that is of interest to be built, but the response to "wen", at least for the initial release, is Q1. 😀