Monopoly has always been the problem of business growth and consumer satisfaction. Where only one company or firm holds franchise of producing a product, it keeps consumers at the mercy of whether or not they want to grow. I made the above screenshots of the prices of steem, SBD, hive and HBD on the steempeak and Peakd wallets page at the time printed. Earlier during the day, there was a buzz in the Steem and JTS Telegram groups as to the pump of steem which eventually grew beyond hive which has been on the lead in the past 14 days.
For me, I saw this a welcomed development that will surge a healthy competition between steem and the hive ecosystems which would lead to a concerted growth in both chains to the favour of investors and content creators. It musn't have been pronounced but the major problem of steem was the "overconfidence of monopoly" of being the first blockchain-powered social platform with fast and free transactions.
Now, that we have the hive ecosystem offering the same services and similar products as steem and of course contesting for DApp untilisation and users, it is time we will see steem grow and this would better the lots of the users of both chains. What seemed too difficult for Steemit Inc to do in the past would now be done at whatever cost to keep the users, who actually define the worth and vitality of the system.
It's cool to see the prices of steem and hive struggling for supremacy, though, the more demanded and the token with more utility would scale. Its also cool that both tokens are greening and I'll love to see them both scale over the 20th percentile of a dollar.
Another change that would give one of steem snd give an advantage over another is the steem-engine/hive-engine tokens. I will dedicate a full post for this, but let me quickly mention that the second layer tokens had placed so much demand on steem with over $10million held in the steem-engine. I personally hold large volumes of SPORTS, MARLIANS, DBLOG in stakes. Imagine all the three tokens move to give, then, I'll have nothing to do with Steven anymore. Even when LeoFinance has moved to give chain, the LEO token is still exchangeable for steem still giving more utility to steem.
Both chains must be at their best to see that the tribes tokens still find their usability within their ecosystem. In any case,the growth of both chains would be a win to the crypto world at large.
Let's watch...