When it comes to the hive blockchain there's a lot of payouts that happen for content creation. That content can be in the form of articles, picture sets, video and threads. What many don't realize though is the power that comes behind powering up your newly found assets instead of cashing them out for instant gratification.
What Does Powered Up Hive Offer
When you create content on hive a half of it you earn in rewards is already instantly powered up. For example if your post makes $10 then you make $5 of which the other $5 is paid out to curators and the $5 you earned is currently split between $2.5 of hive that is instantly powered up and $2.5 of HBD that is liquid that you can either sell, stake for 20% APR at the current rate or convert into Hive which you could then power up into more hive if you wanted.
As for curation rewards 100% of that is instantly powered up into hive. So you can see a large percentage of new hive is instantly powered up across all active accounts.
Now sure powering up Hive earnings the future you more value over time but it also plays a critical factor in the ecosystem allowing you to vote on things such as DHF proposals. DHF proposals are development projects which take from a pool of money and give it to developers of these platforms. By holding Hive powered up you get a increased stake weight on what you want to see and don't want to see get funded.
You could consider the DHF money as money that would be sold off and exit hive for the most part. So if it's not brining more value into the blockchain then I personally would consider that a project that should no longer get DHF funding. Now there are other things like SQL etc which create the working horse of the blockchain backend which wouldn't earning funding otherwise. It's important to read up and understand what each means. Even if you just spend time to research one that's better than not casting a vote at all. You can vote on DHF proposals here
You also get to vote on witnesses who are people or companies that run nodes for the hive blockchain and should be keeping everything in good order and running. You can vote for your favorite witnesses via your powered up hive. You can vote for witnesses here
What Does Powered Up LEO Offer
Unlike $HIVE , $LEO comes in liquid form (at least for the most part) this liquid form on curation rewards and earnings from your posts allows the user to fully make the choice on their own what they would like to do with it.
You could power it up so you'll earn a higher vote weight and thus more in curation rewards in the future or you could sell it, put it into defi platforms like CubDeFi and more options.
You also now have the ability to earn up to 22% APR on your Hive by delegating it to leo.voter and opting in to stake it all instead of getting a liquid payout and also being a premium user which is 10 HBD a month.
The benefits to powering up your Leo is that you'll be earning some extra rewards by showing you are committed to the growth of the overall platform. You'll also earn higher curation rewards from the curation rewards pool by having more Leo powered up. There's also a number of other fun factors that are still being worked on for the future. Those being NFTs, level rewards for example the highest is currently 150,000 Leo powered up and more in the pipeline!
As you can see from the above powering up has a vast amount of reasons why you should. You'll be earning more over time, showing your commitment to the platform and its growth and be able to take on an increasingly pivotal part in what makes hive and leo great through votes.