I noticed an announcement on Bittrex a couple of days back that it's removing its Hive-USD trading pair, and low and behold today it's no more...
One less exchange where you can change FIAT directly for HIVE.
But does it matter...?
In terms of kudos for HIVE I guess this is not a great thing, it's never great to get a trading pair delisted, and having a direct FIAT on and off ramp gives wider legitimacy to HIVE.
Unless you're a crypto purist and think FIAT is a dirty old technology and we should just stop thinking in terms of dollar conversions altogether, personally I'm not quite there yet, berate me for this in the comments if you like!
In terms of convenience it might make a slight difference as now you have to buy USDT or BTC before buying Hive, and selling HIVE means a similar second step. But this will only ever be for dollar deposits, for trading it makes little difference because the HIVE-USDT pair remains intact....
In fact maybe for traders this is now better as all the $ HIVE liquidity is now on one market not two, presumably meaning you can trade in greater volume.
And this probably isn't that significant as there's around three times less HIVE stored on Bittrex compared to Binance, and a lot more on Upbit.
So while it's obviously not great news that Hive's lost a FIAT trading pair, in the grand scheme of things it's not that bad.
I'm personally a little upset as Bittrex was only the second exchange I signed up to, shortly after Kraken, but that's just emotions, get over them I guess!
I guess the more worrying sign is that this just reflects a lack of wider interest in Hive more generally.
Which in turn reflects how stagnant it feels around here, as one just watches the ratio of comment farmers increase post by post!