How Do You Make Money With Hive? Part 1

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With the recent explosion in DeFi, the ETH price and many other assets in the crypto space rising in terms of both valuation as well as attention from the media, I feel it’s more important now than ever before to explain the value proposition of HIVE.

Hive is one of the most interesting ecosystems in all of crypto. For those who don’t understand it, it seems like some obscure platform where people write blog posts or post a picture of their cat and earn some highly inflated cryptocurrency in exchange. To some who followed the Steem-Hive situation, Hive is a decentralized fork of the well-known Steem/Steemit blockchain.

Building LeoFinance and getting more users means spending more time on other social platforms.. Especially Twitter. I’ve been spending an enormous amount of time on Twitter over the past few months for a lot of different reasons, but the primary driver is to onboard more people to LeoFinance and consequently, to Hive.

One of the most common questions out there from people of varying knowledge related to Hive is:

“How Do You Make Money With Hive?”

Many on this platform have said this continually: you come to Hive for the money, but you stay for the community. This is exactly what drew me to this ecosystem 4 years ago and I know that it is exactly what will drive more people like me to this ecosystem today.

The explosion in ETH and DeFi is directly correlated to peoples’ desire to earn cryptocurrency. Most people want to know how they can put their crypto or time to work for them and earn some type of yield.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that this post is aimed at those potential Hive/LeoFinance users: the people who want to earn some crypto/stack sats and who haven’t yet seen all that Hive can offer in those regards.

There are dozens of ways to earn crypto on Hive. That’s what makes this blockchain ecosystem so fascinating. Depending on your personality, what you enjoy doing, your talents etc. you can earn crypto on Hive in myriad ways.

In this post, I’ll talk about the ways that I earn HIVE/Crypto for being a part of the Hive ecosystem. There are plenty of other ways to earn Hive that I don’t discuss here, and if you’re an established Hiver, feel free to leave a comment below this post and spread the word about your preferred methods.

Let me first be clear in saying this: not every way to earn Hive is for everyone and you also won’t get rich overnight on Hive. My primary driver for being on Hive is not to make money (at least, not in the short-term sense). My driver for showing up each day stems from a place of personal achievement first and money second. If you’re looking for the best way to make the most amount of money online, Hive is not that.

Hive is a place where you can do what you love and get paid for it. How much you get paid is very subjective and that’s why I believe the most important lesson for Hive is to do what you’re passionate about and let the money be a secondary proverbial cherry on top of the ice cream sundae.

Curating

I like to curate content and support people who add value to the Hive blockchain. Before I started LeoFinance, I curated content that I liked reading on Hive. Most of it was about Hive/crypto because that is what I’m ultimately interested in.

Today, I curate content in the LeoFinance community primarily. This way, I get to support Hive authors who also support LeoFinance by being a part of our community. I curate manually with this account (@khaleelkazi) and with the @leo.voter account for LeoFinance x Hive posts.

As you can see, curating on Hive can be a pretty valuable activity. This particular account has quite a bit of HIVE POWER and earns a decent amount of rewards, but it is far from “a lot of income". As I said before: do what you love and let the rewards be secondary.

If you check on the accounts of some large Hive stakeholders, you can see people who earn thousands upon thousands of USD per month for curating content. This is obviously due to the size of their staked HIVE. For most people, curating content is not going to make them rich… but it all goes back to my overarching point: on Hive you can do what you like doing and get paid for it.

For me, I get to read and upvote content about finance & crypto (that I would read about elsewhere anyways) and earn a little $ each month for my effort.

Blogging and Content Creation

Blogging and content creation play a central role in the Hive ecosystem. The original use case of Hive is as a social platform for creating and engaging with content.

Here is a snapshot of my author rewards on Hive for the past 30 days. I've made about $500 USD for my blog posts. I post about 7-10 times per week and do a mix of long-form article (like this one) and videos like the LEO Roundtable Podcasts and the Tech Talk Podcasts.

I wrote a post that dove more into the nuances of earning an income on Hive (especially as a content creator) - if you're interested.

Again, drawing back on my original statement about earning money on Hive: do what you love to do and worry about the payouts as a secondary measure.

I spend an enormous number of hours each week writing posts, editing videos, producing content, etc. and the $500 per month that I earn is not worth those amount of hours (personally speaking, as I know that amount of money is not measly for many other people from different parts of the world). The real reason why I spend so much time creating content is because:

I enjoy writing
I enjoy recording podcasts
The content builds the LeoFinance community

Obviously, I still enjoy the rewards that I earn on content and I appreciate all the people who take the time to upvote me (or set their trail to do it). The way that I like to frame it is this:

The income that I earn from blogging/creating videos is still significant enough that I pay attention to the $ each month, but not significant enough to be the only reason why I post content.

This post is running extremely long (already over 2000 words), so I'll finish writing the rest of it and then drop part 2 later today. In it, I'll talk about the other ways you can earn crypto on Hive:

~~Curating Content~~
~~Creating Content~~
Delegating to Projects For Passive Yield
Trading/Using Second-Layer Tokens
Building a Business/Community
Trading Hive
Freelancing on Hive

Feel free to spread this post around - especially to people who are Hive-curious, but who haven't taken the plunge yet. The point of this post is to inspire and encourage people to start using Hive to do the things that they enjoy doing and earn some crypto as a side benefit.

LeoFinance is an online community for crypto & finance. We run several projects that are powered by Hive and the LEO token economy: