As I imagine you are aware, Hive is fairly stagnant this year. If you follow 's daily stats posts, you'll know that transactions per day as well as monthly active users have been dropping substantially, primarily due to reducing numbers from the major Hive-based games. Some of that is improved efficiency and a reduction of bots, but a reduction of user activity also seems apparent.
For Hive, the social media side of the network never exploded in 2021 like the games did, but nonetheless that aspect of Hive has also dropped off since the January 2022 peak (not anywhere to the same degree). Below is monthly active authors since the split from Steem, the latest month of July is not complete and thus is shaded differently. Active authors are continuing to drop in 2023.
Venezuelans are our largest demographic, and while they experienced more of a double-peak, they declined from the same period but are more or less flat in 2023. Please note that for this chart and most that follow below, it only shows users who have identifiable location data in their profile. This represents only a small subset of users, and the real number should be 3-5 times higher.
Another way of representing our Venezuelan userbase is with the 'spanish' tag as a proxy. This seems to indicate a slightly better trend in 2023.
Within Venezuela, there is the merchant on-boarding project in the state of Sucre. This is where we have our highest penetration rate, particularly in CumanĂ¡. Since the project started in early 2023, user activity has been growing again and is not far below the peak. Sucre also now represents 10% of our active Venezuelan users judging by profile location data.
There are a couple of other examples of places bucking the trend. Cebu, Philippines is the biggest Hive hotspot outside of Venezuela. There recently was a big Hive presence at a crypto conference there, and in 2023 we are growing in Cebu.
I would be amiss not to mention Cuba, where we have had remarkable growth despite the bear market.