At the end of last year HIVE was trading at about 17 cents and then less than 2 months later it had shot up to a high of about 66 cents. An increase of 288% in such a short span of time is pretty remarkable, but if you've been around HIVE (and STEEM) for a while it is not entirely a new phenomenon. Due to the nature our Tokenomics (specifically, staking) big price pumps are not that uncommon.
Source
Since we hit that big high of 66 cents on January 7 this year the price of HIVE did settle down a bit, hitting a low of about 19 cents on April 7 (exactly 3 months later) and now it's started grinding slowly higher again over the last couple of weeks. From a Technical Analysis perspective that does look like a bottom may have been found, but does that mean a new pump could be due?
I started looking more closely at this after someone pointed out to me that the APR on HIVE at Binance had again just hit 50%. You can check this out in real time HERE and while it's reasonable to speculate that this is because someone is looking to Short Sell HIVE I went looking to see if I could get some history of such a whopping APR on HIVE...and yes, I found some.
I found a couple of references HERE and HERE where people were posting about big APRs on HIVE. They are dated December 29 and January 8 which was right in the midst of the most recent pumps of just a few months ago. The latter caught the peak, but the former was still before the HIVE price would then go on to double.
What does this mean? Who knows, but I think something is brewing. Maybe the play of the manipulators is to borrow a bunch of HIVE, so that they can then pump the price and dump the borrowed HIVE at a new interim high. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this is exactly how it plays out. It certainly could be a good time for HIVE holders to be vigilant...and liquid.