A few days have passed now since Hard Fork 25 on the Hive blockchain and while we still don’t know what the full implications are going to be for the Silver Gold Stackers Community Curation Project (or Precious the Silver Mermaid, as we more affectionately know her) it’s a good time for an update on how things have been going and what we need to look out for going forward.
Things have been so smooth and stable in recent months that it has become a too bit boring to post about. The Hive Power of the curation account has been pretty constant around the 235,000 mark for a long time now. Even though we’ve seen the Hive price itself fluctuate a lot (impacting our vote values) the Hive Powering our Precious behind the scenes is steady as a rock.
Precious still leases a fair chunk of Hive Power, but a few months back I was able to replace all of the leases from dlease.io via off-market lease deals with trusted members of the Silver Gold Stackers community. This was a good win as not only has it made managing the account easier, but by cutting out the dlease commissions it’s also delivered a substantial saving to the project (almost $30 USD...ahem, an ounce of silver a week!) while still offering our trusted members a great return on their leased Hive Power and still serving out fat upvotes. That’s a Win – Win – Win – Win outcome right there.
We still have had some excess voting capacity so manual curation of the #SilverGoldStackers tag has also continued to spend up that excess. The manual curation delivers an extra intangible benefit by rewarding engagement on our members posts, but also encouraging newcomers to the tag and the community. We’ve had an uptick in recruitment recently and it’s hard to know if there is ever a causation or correlation, but it’s hard to believe that encouraging some activity and content on our tag is not helping at least a little bit.
The Hard Fork was implemented on the Hive blockchain a few days ago and there are a number of functionality changes that could have some impact on Precious for better or worse. Rather than focus too much on the changes, I’ll try to explain what I think some of the impacts might be and some of the things we need to keep an eye on going forward.
The way curation works has changed and it is quite possible that the rewards generated from the project will change as well. In the short term we might take a bit of a hit as apparently votes made in the 7 days leading up to the Hard Fork will not generate any curation reward. So, for us that’s going to be an earnings loss worth a few ounces of silver this week. There is also no longer a benefit to voting in the first 5 minutes so the customized auto-voting bot might need a few optimizations or tweaks if our curation earnings take a significant hit over the medium term and we can find a smarter way to do things. Going forward we will have to keep an eye on our Curation Rewards to see if there could be an issue here, because we do rely on those rewards to maintain the leases of our Hive Power.
There have been some big improvements in the way the Hive Backed Dollar functions. Firstly, the peg to $1 USD should now be stronger, and secondly, HBD put into Savings will now generate an interest rate return which is currently 7% annually. Precious has always maintained a balance of liquid Hive to pay for Hive Power leases and the account runs a perpetual power down to stay liquid, however some of this excess liquid Hive Power can be kept in Savings where it has only a 3 day withdraw wait. Even with a 3 day wait, the HBD Savings is still liquid enough to manage the leases week to week, but it also offers some stability of value and a passive income from interest generated too. Today I put some of our excess liquid HIVE into SBD Savings and that should start earning interest soon.
With many of the major changes to the blockchain over recent years there has been a shift in the “equilibrium” for how the market values leases of Hive Power. The market rate for leasing is typically just driven by supply and demand and it has been steady for a long time now, however this equilibrium could now change in the aftermath of HF25. This is going to very much be a wait-and-see concern for us, but if the market rate for leases goes up we might have to drop our power back a bit, while if it goes down we might need to shave some percentage points from our off-market lessors payments. I’m cautiously optimistic that there won’t be any major issues here, but it’s important to give a heads-up warning just in case there is.
Overall, there is every reason to be optimistic that our Curation Project is getting stronger, our community is growing and the Hive blockchain that we are operating on is improving too.