It's time for the annual Hive whale checkup
Last year I had the idea to look at Hive's top 20 HP whales and see what they were up to. While it's nothing ground breaking and the changes aren't that dramatic, we can still spot some interesting trends. Here is an overview of the top 20 HP whales (without exchanges) for the last 3 years (snapshot around fall):
We can see that the amount of HP they hold has grown steadily (not surprising since they are potentially getting a lot of Hive through inflation and curation), but we can also see that there is a bit of movement in the top spots. I have marked them here by color (with green showing movement up the ladder, red downwards and blue are newcomers). The first few spots are very stable with little movement (I also removed blocktrades.com as I only wanted to show accounts that aren't obviously doing exchange stuff).
In 2024 we saw 6 accounts moving up the ladder and 5 moving down. In 2025 we can see 5 moving up, 2 down and 4 newcomers: stoodkev, solominer, azircon, yabapmatt. There are also 3 whales that aren't in the top 20 anymore with them being: xeldal, elmerlin and pharesim.
What have they been up to?
While this is probably the more interesting question to ask, it is also the more difficult one to answer. First, it helps to visually show the HP changes that happened from 2024 to 2025 and it looks like this:
Blocktrades, alpha and darthknight show the biggest net positive changes and we essentially only have two accounts showing a new negative change: theycallmedan and themarkymark. Although when we include the whales that didn't make the list anymore it brings the number up to 5.
Perhaps an even more interesting way to look at the numbers is to show how the whale's HP has changed in the last year according to how it could have changed. In other words, if we assume that whales are active and participate in curation and they they also receive inflation for holding Hive powered up, this adds up to around 10-12%. So how has their HP reflected this change? Has it over or under performed or stayed relatively the same?
In this chart we can see that if the bar is relatively small that this account's actual growth equates to its potential growth: overall, they got pretty much the same amount of HP we would expect when they are active and earn through inflation. If the bar is postive, then they got much more HP over the last year than we'd expect. If the bar is negative, then it is much less.
Here we can see that 9 accounts have less HP than expected:
Roadscape, themarkymark, hamesc, trafalgar, adm, rancheloraxo, mika, theycallmedan and freedom.
6 accounts have more than expected:
steempty, smooth, altleft, gtg, darthknight and alpha.
Conclusion
I guess these results show pretty much what we would expect with some whales gaining and others losing influence. But it is noteworthy that there are a few big "outliers" going in both directions. It's hard of course to guess what has motivated whales to act in this way, but overall I don't think there is any cause for alarm, i.e. it would be a different picture if most whales would be obviously powering down and selling Hive. This is not the case. Even so, we'd have to expect whales selling Hive to cover costs etc. from being e.g. a witness.
I guess the good news is that it has hardly ever been so cheap to become a whale. It "only" takes around $60k to get around 500k HP. It would be a no brainer to buy more Hive now if we'd know that the network continues to grow and improve (although I wonder how much price actually correlates with fundamentals). I guess it comes down to your conviction: do you believe that Hive can pull off what it did in 2021 and even better, to retain its value?
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