Can Layer Two Fix the Problems on Hive?

Can Layer Two Fix the Problems on Hive?.png

I read a few posts recently talking about many of the issues we face here on Hive. One thing that many people talked about was the price of HIVE and how it didn’t participate much in the latest crypto rally.

While some are concerned about that, I’m a bit more optimistic. I find rallies based on Bitcoin rising to be completely serendipitous. Sometimes, even the best cryptocurrency projects don’t rally alongside the Bitcoin/ETH bulls. BAT is another good example of a crypto with amazing fundamentals that barely participated in the last run.

So forgetting about price, let’s talk about the future of Hive.

The Future is on the Second Layer

To me, the future of Hive lies on the second layer. The people and projects that build on top of Hive are what make Hive what it is today and what it can be tomorrow.

One of the core issues for Hive is getting new users. We all want this place to grow and be successful, but the number one thing that needs to be addressed is onboarding. We all talk about it, we all know it’s there, but nobody has really made much of any progress in creating a formalized program for bringing massive amounts of users on board.

First, let’s define massive amounts of users: Hive account@dalz has a myriad of Hive reports to choose from in which he analyzes chain metrics for Hive. One of his reports estimated the Hive user base at anywhere from 5,000-10,000 actual users. This is pretty small potatoes to the rest of the world, but this is a mid-to-large sized user base in the crypto space.

In my opinion, a successful onboarding initiative would be one that increases this overall user base by at least 5% — adding 250-500 active monthly users to the Hive ecosystem.

The Distinction — Hive Users or Second-Layer Users

A distinction needs to be made between Hive users and second-layer users. The various communities and projects on Hive will all need to define who they are targeting and why they are targeting that specific group.

One of the many reasons why onboarding hasn’t worked in the past is because of a lack of focus when it comes to bringing people onto this blockchain. Oftentimes on Twitter and elsewhere, I see Hive users trying to convince non-Hivers to join Hive because it’s a great project.

While this shows great initiative and I think it works in some edge case scenarios, I believe that the way to onboard hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of users is by focusing on one particular layer of Hive and essentially forgetting the rest.

The Foundation of LEO

When I started LEO (LeoFinance) over a year ago, I imagined something that could actually bring users to this ecosystem by not worrying about the base layer. A community that could bring in new users based solely on using our community and not worrying about the broader community at large (unless it became relevant to a particular user overtime).

Another way to think about this is by looking at other social media platforms. Let’s use Twitter as an example.

As a new user on Twitter, you might decide what level of user you want to be. Do you just join Twitter and follow a couple of friends and use it to have conversations with them?

Or do you join Twitter, follow a bunch of politicians and begin harassing them in the comments? Or do you join Twitter and try to do growth hacking to grow your account and market some sort of product?

There are different levels of Twitter users with varying degrees of expertise on the underlying platform. Some people know how to maximize attention because that is their primary focus on Twitter. Others just want some basic conversations with their friends. They don’t want to see their analytics and they don’t care what anyone outside of their circle does.

Following the same logic, there are varying degrees of Hive users. Some will want to join a community like LeoFinance and never have two thoughts about the underlying blockchain called Hive. They might be aware that there’s this blockchain thing underpinning the crypto/finance community that they are engaged in, but they may not want anything to do with it.

Another user may come to LeoFinance and become increasingly interested in the base layer. Or they may become increasingly interested in another second-layer application/community.

The long-winded point that I am making is that onboarding needs to happen in an isolated chamber. There can be onboarding initiatives for Hive - but those should target the type of people who want to invest in a cryptocurrency and build on a network. Onboarding real daily users should be done by the second-layer communities and applications. Those communities and applications should onboard people specifically for the purpose of onboarding them to their community/app without worrying about the Hive layer.

I was talking to someone yesterday about how Leo plans to onboard normies into our community so that we can flourish outside of the Hive ecosystem. Our long-term roadmap includes adding a targeted and easy-to-use signup process to our new blogging interface (once the core features are in place).

We’re going to build the Leo interface to target people who are non-hivers. We want the average reader of crypto and finance to bookmark LeoFinance.io as a place where they can read stuff that they’re interested in. Some of those readers will eventually grow curious about this blog & earn aspect and decide to signup for an account. We’ll have that process streamlined all directly on the website so that they don’t have to leave our website and go to some other “tool” to create an account.

From there, we can build both organic and paid leads. Organic leads will come in exactly how you think they will — organically. From content on other platforms, google traffic, Twitter, etc. Paid leads will follow a process where we do paid ads on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter, etc. and offer something like a daily crypto newsletter sent to their email address. From there, we’ll make mentions about LeoFinance in the newsletter along with links back to our website.

Some readers will become increasingly curious about the platform they’re reading on and will signup.

It’s not going to be easy, but the process is there and it makes sense. The second-layers will rule the future of Hive. If enough communities/apps come up with ways to bring in hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of users each, then we’ll see Hive flourish into the ecosystem that we all know it can be. A base layer empowering projects built on top of it to bring in users to those second-layers which store data on the base blockchain without many users even knowing or caring.

LeoFinance is an online community for crypto & finance. We run several projects that are powered by Hive and the LEO token economy: