There are a lot of reasons to be excited about Hive.
And the current spot price is not one of them. As much as I wanted to believe that, "This time is different," it alas, never is. Hive has a very demoralizing way of disappointing us during this phase of the market cycle. We just trade flat forever even when everything else is going up.
Even though Hive is my biggest bag I'm always wondering if I should be buying more. In fact I do have half a Bitcoin sitting on the sidelines for that exact purpose should the opportunity present itself. After all, one of my best trades ever was buying in the 10-15 cent range back in 2020. Interestingly enough it took several months of worry and second-guessing before that move actually paid off. The things that charts could never tell a person who didn't have to live it.
With a token like Hive the best time to buy in is always going to be when morale is absolutely horrible and most of the community is completely disillusioned with the platform. We'd also expect many prominent figures coming forward with how to tweak the tokenomics to 'fix' the system when in reality the only fix is to keep grinding and push forward into the bull market.
If I'm being honest with myself morale on the platform isn't that low, it could be much much lower. Our incentive mechanics are fully intact and emissions are covering the cost of infrastructure. However we have gotten a lot of these bear-market-ideas that all revolve around printing less tokens to make number go up. Which is ironic because a recession is exactly when we want to be printing on money and taking on debt so we can hit the ground running in the bull market to pay it all back when things are doing well, but I digress.
Seeing Hive near rank #350 is insane.
That alone makes me think I should buy more because it wasn't that long ago that we were hovering around rank #220 for months or even years. It's going to take an x2 in price just to get back to where we were before. We need to pull an x7 just to get back into the top 100, which is a rank that is not only achievable but arguably where we belong considering no other network is out there doing what we are doing.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter
I'm still being very conservative with my Bitcoin and refusing to buy in at this gutter-trash rank because my portfolio is woefully off-balance. Looking back I have never owned enough Bitcoin and if I was making smart financial decisions I would be rotating even harder into it given the current environment.
One Hive is currently 650 sats and looking at the history of this pair I can't really justify further overextension until we get into the 250-400 sat range. Hopefully this would have nothing to do with Hive going down and everything to do with Bitcoin going up. Given the institutional adoption and upcoming halving event we could easily find ourselves in this range. In fact it could even take a year longer to get there; which is a depressing prospect to be sure.
Seeing as half a Bitcoin is 50M sats and my ultimate target is 250 sats per Hive... it's possible that if I get lucky and these numbers collide I could pick up another 200k Hive, which would end up getting me quite close to being a whale around these parts; a huge milestone to be sure. Last I checked there were only 27 whales across the entire network, although we may have added a couple since then.
Regardless such a thing would be a huge accomplishment considering my personal circumstances. When I first got here in 2017 I was worried I'd never even be a dolphin/orca. The prospect of whale-status was absolutely out of the realm of possibility, and yet here we are. Not only is the goal within reach but I would have already gotten there if I had actually played the last market cycle even half correctly.
Hive's biggest problem?
As of this moment in our history the network's biggest issue is liquidity. It was not that easy to buy Hive before all the regulatory crackdowns occurred, and it is exponentially more difficult now Bittrex and Binance are no longer options for a lot of people. On top of that exchanges like Huobi may still have a listing but are potentially captured by bad-actors like Justin Sun, so that's not great. I personally use MEXC which magically has no KYC and leverage but still has piss poor liquidity. Then there are the South Korean exchanges that aren't even accessible to the outside world even though they're holding a staggering and alarming 120M coins. Eek.
For all the talk I've done about HBD yield I'd take it all back in an instant and allocate those emissions to a Hive/HBD AMM as an alternative to the current orderbook. This would create actual (exponential) liquidity rather than pulling money out of the system. By tethering the Hive price to its own derivative stable coin our network becomes less volatile in both directions.
Example: Huge Hive/HBD farm with $millions on each side.
Price of Hive goes up on exchanges due to demand. For simplicity let's say it goes up 10% from $1 to $1.10. However, Hive is still worth $1 on the internal market. Users on Hive can buy from this pool and dump tokens into the demand on exchanges. Price of Hive will go up, but not as fast.
On the flipside: price of Hive goes down on exchanges from dumping and the opposite happens. Now users have an incentive to buy cheap Hive and sell it on the internal market for HBD. If the spread is safe enough this HBD or Hive can easily be converted in either direction given the situation at hand.
Unfortunately this is all a quite moot point because the chance of it being integrated on the first layer with a hardfork seems very unlikely given the feedback I've received. Second layer solutions are possible but difficult to incentivize. I have a few ideas but I've already gone off the rails enough as is.
Conclusion
Is now a good time to buy Hive? Yeah, it's a great time... as long as you have a balanced portfolio and aren't hopelessly all-in already as many of us have been for years. The benefits of holding value outside of our favorite network in order to stabilize it can not be overstated. Difficultly of achieving such financial Zen equates to real psychological skill. Maybe one day I'll get the hang of it and rotate correctly, but for now I'm stuck in the mud along with the rest of the network.
It's always a darkest before the dawn situation with Hive. It seems to be that our constant state of being is either a massive euphoric pump, a slow bleed out, or infinite crab-walking at the bottom of the ocean. It would seem that our outflows are many and our inflows are riddled with hype and paper-handed fat-finger buy orders. It is what it is.