Hey everyone! 2024 was an incredible year for INLEO and the Hive Ecosystem. ICYMI: 18 months ago, INLEO launched our first-ever proposal on the Hive blockchain. INLEO's budget for developing our ecosystem has expanded quite dramatically. We 100% self-fund development, technology, APIs, frontends, etc.
With our DHF proposal, we asked for a marketing budget. This budget was used entirely on:
- Partnerships & Collaborations
- Traditional Marketing - Ad Spend on X and Other Platforms
- Influencer Marketing
- Guerilla Marketing
- Adoption Campaigns
- Organic Growth
Being self-funded when it comes to development is very important to me. It always has been. It gives us the leverage and flexibility to build how we see fit. When you look at the technological achievements from the INLEO team throughout 2024, you'll see a highly effective team, community and ecosystem. We've delivered on SO MANY innovations for the Hive blockchain. To name just a few of the standouts amongst the hundreds of new features & developments in 2024:
- Microblogging
- Microvideos - Shorts at scale using 3speak as the storage provider
- Decentralized, HIVE POWER & LEO POWER Stake-Weighted Poll Voting
- L1 Cross-Chain Swaps with our new app, https://leodex.io
- Hive Lite Accounts for seamless onboarding
- Keystore Signups for cross-chain, seamless onboarding
- LeoMerchants: you can now buy INLEO Premium and (soon) other products/services using ANY crypto with all payments being settled as HBD on the Hive Blockchain
- Creator Subscriptions - allowing Hive authors to monetize their accounts with a substack-like encrypted blog/thread feed
...and countless more!
Self-funding our development has so many perks and we will continue to build innovative features on the Hive blockchain. Over 2024, you saw many other UIs follow along with things we've built and we believe that trend will continue as INLEO leads the way in innovating things like Microblogging, MicroShorts, Encrypted Content Subscriptions, Cross-Chain Payments, etc.
On Marketing
Marketing what we've built to the outside world is how we get more users to join Hive. "Build it and they will come" is not a viable approach to growing an ecosystem. We need to both build it and find ways to convince them to come.
The DHF Marketing Proposal that we launched 18 months ago was a key piece of the equation. We needed the funds to tell the world what we've built. Without a serious marketing budget, ecosystems like Dash, Arbitrum Foundation, ChainFlip, Maya, Thorchain, etc. would never take us seriously.
If you recall our DHF proposal, we said that we would cross the 10k Monthly Active User mark by December 31st, 2024. If we didn't, we would give back 100% of the DHF funds we received.
I believe in accountability and in delivering on your milestones. If we have a Hive DHF that doesn't have accountability, then we'll see a major lack of delivery. We see far too many promises of future things and not nearly enough delivering on those promises.
I am proud to say that when you look at INLEO and the promises we make: we over promise and over deliver.
- We promised to bring Microblogging at scale to Hive, we delivered.
- We promised to bring L1 Cross-Chain Trading to HIVE/HBD, we delivered.
- We promised to bring Hive Lite Accounts to onboard the masses, we delivered.
- We promised to bring cross-chain Hive accounts, we delivered.
- We promised to bring the ability to pay in anything, earn in anything, we delivered.
And now, I am proud to say that we promised 10k+ Monthly Active Users to the Hive blockchain and we delivered:
13,417 monthly active users on INLEO as of December 31st, 2024.
Out of those, 4,855 are active creators. The ratio of creators and consumers on INLEO is vastly different than any other social media platform. On traditional Web2 platforms, 90% of users passively consume content.
On INLEO, over 36% of all signed-in monthly active users create content on a regular basis.
Partnering with the Dash Ecosystem
In addition to our other partnerships, collaborations, traditional marketing, infleuncer marketing and various guerilla campaigns - speaking at schools, hosting live onboarding events, etc. - we found a significant amount of growth in partnering with, collaborating with and integrating the Dash ecosystem.
In September, I (Khal) attended HiveFest 2024. @starkerz introduced Joel and I. He said that the two of us would have a lot to talk about and would hit it off.
Joel is a Dash Team member and Starkerz/@theycallmedan flew him out for HiveFest 2024 in Croatia.
Joel and I chatted about crypto and general principles the first night at the big group dinner. The next day, we were heading to the Pool Hall. Joel and I took a walk to get coffee and during that walk/at the pool hall later, we started talking about the possibility of bringing Dash to the Hive Blockchain.
Joel made it clear that he wanted to see Dash integrated with Hive and that our two ecosystems had a lot of synergy. The question was UI/UX and how to make it all possible. The answer? INLEO.
INLEO merges the UI/UX of Web2 and the radically valuable features of Web3 on Hive (immutability, decentralization, one account to rule them all, fast and free transactions, etc.).
We hatched a plan to integrated Dash x INLEO which would officially bring the Dash ecosystem and the Hive ecosystem together.
Fast forward about 2 months and the integration officially went live. The Dash Team did a massive PR Run and the INLEO team did a massive X Ads campaign.
We managed to onboard thousands of accounts in a matter of weeks. Not just any accounts, but highly active Dash users, Maya users and other Keystore-based users from across the cross-chain L1 space (Dash and INLEO have a relationship with Maya and are both listed there, which allowed us to have a lot of positive cross-pollination using this new partnership + feature-set to target those audience members).
Many of the INLEO X Ads targeted:
- Dash users on X
- Maya users on X
- Thorchain users on X
- etc.
Keep in mind that the Dash integration was actually a Keystore signup, cashout + payment integration. This means that our perfect target audience is anyone who has a keystore wallet already.
This integration was one of the most valuable things we've done in terms of onboarding high quality users to the Hive blockchain.
Now, let's dive into the details behind this growth.
1). User Counts & Growth
A Monthly Active User (MAU) is a unique user who interacts with the INLEO Platform via a Hive account during the monthly period:
We hit 13,417 Monthly Active Users in the month of December:
We further breakdown Monthly Active Users into two segments:
- Monthly Active Creators: users who are actively posting unique Threads and/or Blog Posts and/or Comments on the Hive Blockchain through https://inleo.io
- Monthly Active Consumers: users who are actively consuming content by upvoting it and otherwise interacting with it but NOT creating unique content on https://inleo.io
this chart specifically shows the growth of users who create unique content on INLEO. We consistently grew throughout the year but as soon as we launched the new Keystore Signup method, we saw a massive surge in user growth.
New Hive Accounts Onboarded By INLEO Through Our Onboarding Account: @leo.voter
From start to finish of our DHF Marketing Proposal, INLEO onboarded 22,595 accounts. This is nearly 1/3rd (29.69%) of the total accounts onboarded to the Hive Blockchain over the same period.
Of those accounts, nearly 50% remained active either as a creator or consumer on the Hive blockchain. Our retention rate is even higher than Web2 platforms!
We consistently onboarded ~1,000 accounts per month but then our new Keystore integration launched toward the end of November. We saw a MASSIVE surge as X Ads Campaigns and Dash Team PRs and Ads Went Live in late November/Early December:
For context, the top 6 account creators are:
- leo.voter 22595
- appreciator 14623
- dbuzz 5568
- ecency 4171
- hive-recovery 2027
- aliento 1729
INLEO is just 5,523 accounts shy of onboarding more than the next top 5 account creators combined.
INLEO Builds the First-Ever Dynamic RC Delegation Pool
Our Resource Credit Delegation pool solves the problem of RCs on Hive. One of the major burdens to onboarding is resource credits. INLEO has built an RC Delegation system that:
- Delegates RCs to new onboards immediately
- Reads their RC level on a minute-to-minute basis
- If it sees their RCs get below 20%, it delegates more RCs to them
- If it sees their RCs sit at 100% for an extended period of time, it pulls back a % of the delegation
- If an inactive user suddenly becomes active again, it delegates RCs to them immediately
TLDR; our RC system ensures that every single onboarded user always has the RCs they need, when they need them.
We are currently delegating RCs to 12,850 accounts for a total of 42464294923140 HIVE Resource Credits. If any of these accounts become inactive, the RC delegation is pulled. If they suddenly become active again, we re-delegate RCs to them. If they run low, we increase the delegation.
2). Engagement Metrics
Threads Per Month:
Threads are the first-ever scalable solution to microblogging on the Hive blockchain. Originally called "Project Blank" over 3 years ago, INLEO invented Microblogging and ushered in an era of scalable, short interactions on the Hive blockchain.
Since inception, Threads on INLEO have grown massively. ICYMI: Threads are like Tweets on Hive. They live at the comment layer. Each Thread is actually a Comment on Hive. INLEO invented containers which are utilized to store comments and display them as threads on https://inleo.io.
Threads ended December with nearly 250k Threads created. The entire Hive Blockchain had 654,994 comments created.
Threads on https://inleo.io now account for over 35% of all Hive blockchain comments. This number was trending upward all year (our % of total Hive comments) and reached a new all-time high in December 2024.
Token Transaction Volume
Over 1.586M individual transactions occurred with LEO on the Hive blockchain during 2024.
INLEO Multimedia Activity
In 2024, we unveiled Shorts which are INLEO's innovation to bring short-form video at scale to the Hive blockchain. We couldn't do this without 3speak's infrastructure as we use 3speak for the hosting + backend operations of Shorts.
Similar to what we did with Microblogging text on Hive, we innovated a new container solution for Microvideos on Hive.
Now - for the first time ever - you can upload as many short-form videos as you want. Videos are capped at 60 seconds max length and you can use the "Shorts" tab on INLEO to view them in a Tik-Tok style format.
Since launching the new Shorts feature, we had 5,801 Shorts in 2024.
Images Uploaded
INLEO has become a major media platform in many ways. Videos are one and thanks to 3speak, we're able to do videos at scale.
Images are another aspect of INLEO that has scaled up. We've built our own image solution and if you try images on INLEO, you'll be amazed at how it works. Try multiple images, different sizes, etc. and you'll see our innovation in this department as well.
We launched our own image infrastructure in the middle of 2024 and since then, over 130,000 images have been uploaded to it and stored on the Hive blockchain.
Growth on All Fronts
The point of this post is to illustrate that INLEO has grown on all fronts. We achieved our goal of onboarding and retaining over 10,000 Monthly Active Users (MAUs) on the Hive blockchain and now we are going to aim at onboarding 50,000 Monthly Active Users (MAUs) on the Hive blockchain in 2025.
Our ambition for 2025 will be matched with expanding all of our existing marketing efforts which were outlined at the beginning of this post.
Additionally, we've built a framework with our Dash integration. This framework is both a tech stack on INLEO & Hive as well as an actual marketing / collaboration template. We're going to use this template and apply it to all of the amazing network partners we've recently been in contact with.
The dash integration opened a lot of doors for us. Now we are talking with the ChainFlip team, Arbitrum Foundation, several Maya frontends, several Thorchain frontends, a prominent ETH Founder, a prominent BTC Community leader and many others.
Throughout Q1 and Q2 of 2025, we'll be rolling out MASSIVE partnerships with all of the above networks. We'll be using the same "Join INLEO, Earn DASH" style campaign with each of the networks and running our ads on X to retarget their community members.
The floodgates are open. Now INLEO allows Hive to be instantly tapped in to all these blockchain networks.
Keep your eyes open for a post tomorrow. INLEO successfully brought 10k MAUs to Hive in 2024 and we are about to bring 50k MAUs to the Hive blockchain in 2025.