Over the past year or so, a hotly debated topic around tokenized rewards has happened across the Hive blockchain. Some say that we should get rid of the Hive rewards pool altogether and focus on tokenized rewards in other forms - either via an SMT or via a second layer token.
Others argue against that point. Saying that the Hive rewards pool is the only thing keeping people around on this blockchain. Here at LeoFinance, we've been doing a monthly report to show our top earning others and compare their rewards in LEO to their rewards paid in HIVE.
Many of these authors now earn far more in USD terms from LEO token rewards than from HIVE rewards. There's also the key point that content discovery on LeoFinance is far superior to Hive - this is another great benefit to being a targeted community that is well moderated. There isn't much to debate on LeoFinance: we know what content is good and what content isn't. On Hive, the topics are more broad and arguments are had over the relevance and value of content.
LEO has skyrocketed in value over the past 30 days. This has been due to several factors:
- Launch of our new Blogging Interface
- Launch of WLEO
- Listings on Coingecko, Blockfolio and Other Apps
- Listing on CoinMarketCap
- Introduction of DeFi Incentives at a 138% APY
- Teaser for the new LeoInfra project
With this rise in price, we've seen a corresponding rise in users, LEO POWER stakeholders and authors. The value of LEO increasing also gives rise to greater rewards on our platform in USD terms.
For this author reward report, we gathered the data for the top 25 authors on LeoFinance (based on LEO earned) and compared their author rewards in both LEO and HIVE. We took the average price of LEO and the average price of HIVE over the past 30 days to calculate the USD value of these rewards:
- Average HIVE price in September: $0.175 USD
- Average LEO price in September: $0.121 USD
Keep in mind that HIVE is now trading at $0.147 USD and LEO is now trading at $0.261 USD. The following author numbers would be skewed even more favorably in LEO's favor if we took today's prices, but instead we use the average prices throughout the month to simulate the real-time value of rewards as the authors are paid out instead of assuming that users would HODL/Stake their LEO/HIVE and wait to sell at a higher price.
Top 25 LEO Authors
This chart shows the top 25 authors on LeoFinance - ranked by how much LEO they earn. In the first column, you see the amount of LEO tokens earned over the past 30 days. The second column shows the total amount of HIVE tokens they earned. Following those are the USD values of the LEO and HIVE they earned (calculated using the monthly average price of LEO/HIVE - $0.121 and $0.175, respectively):
| Rank | Author | LEO | HIVE | LEO $ | HIVE $ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | @rollandthomas | 4,696 | 592 | $568 | $104 |
| 2 | @taskmaster4450le | 3,626 | 5,512 | $439 | $965 |
| 3 | @coyotelation | 2,129 | 211 | $258 | $37 |
| 4 | @khaleelkazi | 2,124 | 2,033 | $257 | $356 |
| 5 | @jrcornel | 2,013 | 3,039 | $244 | $532 |
| 6 | @uyobong | 1,876 | 425 | $227 | $74 |
| 7 | @edicted | 1,853 | 1,340 | $224 | $234 |
| 8 | @trumpman | 1,524 | 959 | $184 | $168 |
| 9 | @scaredycatguide | 1,232 | 450 | $149 | $79 |
| 10 | @dalz | 1,026 | 1,111 | $124 | $194 |
| 11 | @spinvest | 966 | 432 | $117 | $76 |
| 12 | @jondoe | 893 | 948 | $108 | $166 |
| 13 | @chekohler | 799 | 535 | $97 | $94 |
| 14 | @forexbrokr | 792 | 204 | $96 | $36 |
| 15 | @tarazkp | 788 | 3,969 | $95 | $695 |
| 16 | @leofinance | 707 | 1,052 | $86 | $184 |
| 17 | @nealmcspadden | 700 | 771 | $85 | $135 |
| 18 | @cryptomaniacsgr | 699 | 120 | $85 | $21 |
| 19 | @globalcurrencies | 508 | 735 | $61 | $129 |
| 20 | @revisesociology | 471 | 1,298 | $57 | $227 |
| 21 | @josediccus | 455 | 1,470 | $55 | $257 |
| 22 | @behiver | 426 | 266 | $52 | $47 |
| 23 | @abh12345 | 398 | 1,843 | $48 | $322 |
| 24 | @asteroids | 389 | 78 | $47 | $14 |
| 25 | @belemo | 373 | 731 | $45 | $128 |
Top 25 Authors By % of Earnings Represented by LEO
This chart shows those same 25 authors, but it adds the total LEO $ and HIVE $ earnings they received over the past 30 days and then it calculates the % of those earnings that come only from LEO. This essentially shows the dominance of LEO earnings as contrasted with their Hive earnings:
| Rank | Author | Total Rewards $ | LEO % |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | @coyotelation | $295 | 87% |
| 2 | @rollandthomas | $672 | 85% |
| 3 | @cryptomaniacsgr | $106 | 80% |
| 4 | @asteroids | $61 | 78% |
| 5 | @uyobong | $301 | 75% |
| 6 | @forexbrokr | $131 | 73% |
| 7 | @scaredycatguide | $228 | 65% |
| 8 | @spinvest | $192 | 61% |
| 9 | @behiver | $98 | 53% |
| 10 | @trumpman | $352 | 52% |
| 11 | @chekohler | $190 | 51% |
| 12 | @edicted | $459 | 49% |
| 13 | @khaleelkazi | $613 | 42% |
| 14 | @nealmcspadden | $220 | 39% |
| 15 | @dalz | $319 | 39% |
| 16 | @jondoe | $274 | 39% |
| 17 | @globalcurrencies | $190 | 32% |
| 18 | @leofinance | $270 | 32% |
| 19 | @taskmaster4450le | $1,403 | 31% |
| 20 | @jrcornel | $775 | 31% |
| 21 | @belemo | $173 | 26% |
| 22 | @revisesociology | $284 | 20% |
| 23 | @josediccus | $312 | 18% |
| 24 | @abh12345 | $371 | 13% |
| 25 | @tarazkp | $790 | 12% |
These 25 authors earned a total of $9,078 USD in HIVE + LEO rewards over the past 30 days.
A staggering 31% of these total earnings come exclusively in the form of LEO rewards: the USD value of LEO ONLY earnings by these authors was $3,977 USD for the past 30 days.
Some of these users are among the highest rewarded on the Hive blockchain (in HIVE only terms). Which means that it's even harder to "flippen" their rewards and get them to earn a higher % of rewards from LEO as compared to their HIVE rewards. Authors like @jrcornel, @khaleelkazi, @tarazkp, @taskmaster4450, etc. What's interesting is that their rewards from LEO still represent a very significant portion of their total earnings.
Just for fun, if we were to take these LEO / HIVE rewards at today's prices rather than the last 30 day average, you'd end up with these total earnings for the month:
Interestingly enough, the top authors earned almost exactly the same amount of LEO tokens as they earned in HIVE tokens: 32,866 LEO and 32,313 HIVE.
The totals at today's prices:
- $4,749.99 USD value of rewards paid out in HIVE (last 30 days)
- $8,578.05 USD value of rewards paid out in LEO (last 30 days)
- $13,328.04 USD in total rewards paid out in the last 30 days
With today's prices, LEO would represent 64% of the total rewards earned by these 25 authors in the last 30 days.
I personally think this trend will continue but one of the main things that excites me is that we're proving the model that tokenized rewards pools OUTSIDE of just using the native HIVE pool can be an effective way to reward authors.
In my opinion, this is the most effective way to earn rewards. Join a community of like-minded people who share the same interest as you and your content will have better engagement, better rewards and it will be easier to get noticed - especially as a new/small author. This solves many of the problems that Hive faces, and I hope to continue to prove this point over the coming months.
LeoFinance is a blockchain-based social media community for Crypto & Finance content creators. Our tokenized blogging platform (https://leofinance.io) allows users and creators to engage and share content on the blockchain while earning LEO token rewards.
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