One of the most interesting things about the Hive ecosystem for me is that there are just so many different ways to create income streams.
You can easily set up and maintain both passive and active income streams on the same platform. Let’s take a look at some different forms of income streams that you can create on Hive!
Active Income
Creating Content
This is the main attraction that drew me into Hive. As a small content creator I really like that there are so many different frontends/tribes for so many different topics, and they’re interconnected through tags.
This means that it’s super easy to make sure that you reach the intended target audience for your posts, even on multiple blogging platforms.
Also, you’ll earn rewards in several different tokens depending on the amounts of upvotes that you got on different frontends.
When I started out I wanted to find a blogging platform that would allow me to start earning a few cents a day for writing about things that I’m passionate about. I’ve have within a few months far surpassed this goal, and am currently bringing home over a dollar per post, usually.
It might not sound like much, but this is just the beginning. One should never underestimate the snowball effect.
So, how does this income stream work? Create great content, get upvoted by people who found your content valuable and entertaining, receive a payout after one week. It does require you to continually and consistently create good content, but the ceiling for how much you can earn is very high.
Curation by Upvoting
This little gem of a feature is amazing. By spending your voting power to upvote great content, you and the other voters will receive a small portion of the post’s payout.
This truly incentivizes curation and curators, as actual money can be made by simply finding good articles and upvoting them.
As a smaller account you’ll most likely not earn much doing this, but it’s so easy to do and as you’ll naturally want to upvote any content you find valuable, as long as you’re an active reader on Hive, this income stream is basically automatic.
Commenting
If you’re more into holding discussions about topics that others write about, you’re in luck. When you comment on other authors posts, your comment can be upvoted just as any full article, and you’ll earn rewards from those upvotes just as upvotes on full articles.
This means that if you’re an active commenter who posts insightful comments that other readers find interesting or helpful, you can earn quite well from just commenting. You might find that you need to comment on a lot of posts and always make your comments interesting, so this income stream is more of a little side bonus, for me personally.
Passive Income
Curation by Delegation
I love this one. Due to the fact that there’s money to be made by curation and upvoting, and that you’ll earn more if you’re upvote value is higher, there are many curation project on Hive.
These are larger account that scour the frontend, tag, or topic that they want to support and they find great content and upvote it.
This adds value to the author of the post, to the curation project, to the readers who’ll more easily find articles with many votes, and to the Hive blogosphere as a whole, as these high quality articles will be more visible.
The best thing is that you can delegate your HP (or any tribe token power) to these curation projects, who’ll use your HP for curation, and they’ll pay you back most of the rewards that they received. Usually you’ll get a payout of 80-90%.
This means that you can just accumulate HP and delegate it to curation projects to be able to have a completely passive income stream. The challenge here is to accumulate enough HP in the first place.
Accumulating HP can be done through the active income streams that I presented, or by investing your external funds into Hive, so there are options for everyone.
Mining & Investing Tokens
On the Hive Engine, there are many tokens that allow you to earn rewards for simply holding and sometimes staking these tokens. Completely passively.
I’d suggest you read my article A Quick Guide To Hive Engine Mining And Investment Tokens to learn more about this option.
As a buy-and-hodler at heart, I find this income stream very pleasing.
Blockchain Gaming
I put the blockchain gaming income stream as a separate section because in can be anything from almost completely passive to extremely active. It all depends on you preference and on the games that you choose to engage with.
Personally I have three games in mind that I’m interested in at the moment.
Splinterlands
Splinterlands is a collectible trading card game in which you’ll build a deck of cards that you’ll use to battle other players with. The cards themselves are NFTs and most of the have gone up in value quite a bit in the last year.
If you want to take the active route, you’ll most likely complete daily quests to receive free rewards which sometimes include free Splinterlands cards and you’ll battle other players in the Arena, where you’ll earn Dark Energy Crystals, which is a token that can be used to buy more cards or trade on the Hive Engine.
If you want to take the passive route, which I’m currently doing due to a lack of time, you can rent out your cards to other players. This enables you to almost completely passively earn Dark Energy Crystals from your rented out cards. Many people are doing this as a business venture, by investing in rare and powerful cards with the sole intent of earning rent income from them.
Rising Star
In Rising Star you’re basically managing a virtual music career. This game is semi passive, basically an energy management game. You start mission that earn you Starbits, the native token which can be used for buying better cards or be traded on the Hive Engine, and these missions deplete your energy (which regenerates over time). This game requires you to check in a few times a day to start a new mission, but can be played a bit more actively if you want to optimize your energy usage.
For me, who at the moment has a full schedule with work and family, this is so much fun and fits my life perfectly. The game is currently in beta, and will in all likelihood only become even better as it develops further. Seriously great!
dCity
I added this to my list as I’d like to get into it myself. I’ve heard a lot of great things, and I’ve heard that it experiences some balance issues with its economy. I have not researched enough to make any statement about that.
What I do know is that this is a passive city simulation game where your city is made up of NFT cards that represents building and citizens, and you can earn the native token SIM by setting up and balancing your city correctly. From what I’ve heard, if done correctly, this will become a basically completely passive income stream.
My research in this one is a bit on the back burner, as I’m a bit swamped with other projects. But I’m currently trying to get a hold of as much SIM as I can without spending external funds, so I can get started with dCity without risking any non-Hive Engine funds. Just a precaution as I do not yet understand the challenges in this game.
As you can see, there are some many interesting ways to earn an income here on Hive. I bet these different income stream opportunities will only increase as Hive continues to grow and expand.
Buzz, buzz Hive!
Disclaimer
This is not financial advice. Do your own research. You are responsible for your own personal decisions and your own personal economy.
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