Cryptocurrency projects must work with each other to improve their functionality and work towards building a better future for humanity. I do not like to see projects become stuck in a silo. I want to see interoperability. I'm not looking for anything perfect in this area. Such focus on interoperability would inhibit innovation in other areas. But having something simple and imperfect as a Bridge is a net positive that must be celebrated. Yesterday two of those Bridges went away.
EOS and WAX Delisting
What you are going to read below is the official announcement give by the HIVE-Engine developers. Although I am not happy about what transpired, it is fully within the right of the developers to focus on their on self interests. We are not entitled to anything. I am simply unhappy about loosing connectivity with two other blockchains that has amazing technology that are very much similar to HIVE. @dan himself went to create EOS and WAX is using a great deal of the same concepts and design choices.
We have made the hard decision to end our support for the WAX and EOS blockchains, for various reasons including the unsustainability of continuing to run our infrastructure for them in the current market conditions. This means that WAX, EOS, and all EOS based tokens will soon be delisted from our trading markets, and as of now deposits & withdrawals for said tokens have been permanently disabled. We apologize and share your sense of disappointment that this has become necessary.
However, there is a bit of good news: all pending deposits & withdrawals that have been stuck over the past week have now been processed. To make up for the lengthy delay, we have also waived the usual withdrawal fee.
Also, your tokens still on the Engine platform will not be stuck. For a period of 1 month, from now until March 2 midnight UTC, we will allow withdrawal of WAX, EOS, and EOS based tokens through a manual support procedure. All the usual withdrawal fees will be waived. If you wish to make a withdrawal, please open a support ticket at Engine Support . Provide your Hive account name, destination account on the external blockchain, and how much of what token you wish to withdraw. Our support team will then reach out to you and provide instructions on how to proceed.
Please note: to avoid overwhelming our support team, we will only respond to requests for withdrawals of 10 EOS or higher, and 100 WAX or higher. Also, withdrawal requests will be limited to 1 per account per day.
After March 2, the trading markets for these tokens will be disabled, and there will be lengthy delays in recovering any WAX, EOS, or EOS based tokens still left on the Engine platform. Please take out all liquidity from the associated Diesel Pools and raise a support ticket to withdraw said tokens at your earliest convenience. For smaller token amounts below the 10 EOS and 100 WAX thresholds, please trade into SWAP.HIVE.
More DeFi Solutions Are Needed on HIVE
That is how we are going to solve this problem of being stuck in a silo. I cannot program DAPPs. Therefor I'm going to stay away from building any DAPPs. What I can do is write and invest. I have done both of these things in the past and I plan to do that in the future!
I have been talking about THORChain for many years now. What intially attracted me to the project was its ability to swap native assets instead of wrapped version on a specific blockchain (or DAG). Integrating with DeFi platforms makes it easier for new users to invest in HIVE and other projects built on top of HIVE very easily. $HIVE has limited CEX availability and with the exception of SPS and HDB, I have not even seen any other HIVE asset listed on a CEX.
We must at the very least have a wide availability on DEXs. Marketing can get users hyped about a project. Great technology can allow developers to build amazing DAPPs that are faster than Ethereum and have the fees that almost all the blockchains, DAGs etc. have. These are all early parts of the funnel. If we mess up the final part where the prospect make a purchase, most of the previous efforts go to waste. Minimizing friction is the biggest missing piece for HIVE to do great in 2024.
InLeo Has Some Great Plans
Watch from 29:26 of the AMA which is where the DeFi question comes up. I like the ideas @khaleelkazi is talking about. I remember all the previous plans that were discussed regarding launching CUB on multiple EVM blockchains and creating a Multi Token Bridge. I expected the growth of @leofinance to funnel users into DeFi. That did not happen the extent I expected. Cryptosphere is a highly volatile place with many changes happening all the time. In a way I am happy to see that we have at least this much TVL left after everything we went through. I am happy to have contributed to that TVL.
This TVL is not being utilized to its full capacity. There are problems with that @gadrian has already talked about. I am not going to rehash the same details here. You can read his articles here and here and I endorse his message.
The Strength of InLeo Funnel
The following data is taken from Simple Analytics. They are a privacy friendly alternative to Google Analytics. InLeo has been able to reach ~100K visitors and ~500K page views on most months. Paying attention to the countries could be useful here:
If we can convert even 1% of this audience to use the InLeo UI to engage in DeFi, we are going to have 1K Monthly Active Users. This is a fairly decent number for DAPP. Take a look at DappRadar for statistics and you will see that there are only 153 DeFi DAPPs with more than 1,000 Monthly Active Users. There are 18 DAPPs with more than 100K MAU.
"Everything App" With Minima Friction
This should be our goal. Everything is coming under the LEO umbrella. These days there isn't even a need to create a HIVE account and install Keychain to start using blockchain. Users can login with their Web 2 accounts and start creating content and engaging in a matter of seconds. Take this idea and expand it to everything! Make it possible to make your grandma use DeFi! If that goal can be accomplished, $LEO $CUB $POLYCUB can all go to Moon. The best part is that users may not even have to know what these things are behind the hood. All they have to do is use the DAPPs and bring in investments.