Hive has seen an increase in monthly active authors in July and August despite the bear market.
The increase in active authors represents 715 more active authors or almost 9%, it is the largest increase since January 2022, and the largest percentage increase since 2021.
Even more compelling is the number of new users who are joining and becoming active in the social media aspect of Hive.
The number of new users who are joining Hive and actually making a post within their first thirty days has almost doubled in the last two months. Please understand about the above chart - in this metric August is not even complete. August will only be complete for this metric after September 30th - more users who joined in August will become active within 30 days.
This is happening in a bear market.
So what is going on? The answer is mostly new and returning users from Venezuela. There has been a surge in newly active users from Venezuela.
Note: Only a small portion of users set a location profile shortly after joining, so that number above is a significant under-representation. If we instead look at the proportion of newly active user profiles with a Venezuelan location, we can get a fair approximation of the numbers.
25% of newly active accounts with a profile location have a Venezuelan location. This is more than double the typical rate in 2022 and 2023.
It is probably no coincidence that @hivesucre is making all time highs in their merchant HBD adoption project.
It is further no coincidence that August had the highest percentage of posts tagged "spanish" ever yet.
This is also at a time when hive.blog is rising to be one of the top websites in Venezuela.
Hive and Peakd are also starting to be identifiable in the noise of web searches in Venezuela on Google Trends.
It's also worth mentioning that Venezuela isn't even the only place we suddenly saw an increase in active users on Hive, it has also been picking up in Cebu, Philippines and Cuba this month.
