Hey. We heard you’re a fan of wrestling.
And you’re probably here because one of our wrestlers was talking about some shit called “WOO” or “Hive.” This article is a short-ish guide to this Hive thing and why it matters for pro wrestling. It takes about 10 minutes to read, so go grab a beer or something and settle in.
Quick answer to “What the hell is Hive?”
Hive is a big community of people that all use the same technology to do crap online. Some people make games (like WOO). Some people make social media sites. Some people make finance stuff. Most people don’t do any of that—they just play the games or use the websites.
You’re reading this post on one of Hive’s many social media sites (the Hive lingo for such a site is a “frontend”). Maybe it says “peakd” or “ecency” or “inleo” in your URL. All different sites, all using Hive.
So what? Why is Hive different?
The big thing is that no one owns Hive. All the value created by using it is shared among the builders and the users. There is no company or any corporate structure behind Hive.
Another huge difference is the ‘shared’ nature of everything. The games, social sites, and finance stuff are all connected together behind the scenes. If you’re not a technical person, that may not seem like something significant, but if you spend enough time exploring Hive, you’ll soon start to ‘get’ it.
A quick example: once you create a Hive account, you instantly have an account for every single thing that uses Hive, and everything that will ever be built on Hive in the future.
One more big thing: stuff on Hive is what we call “censorship-resistant.” Since no one owns it, no one can remove anything you post—not even you. So there’s a tradeoff: things you do on Hive are quite permanent, and always publicly accessible.
Hive is also the “same” as a lot of things
A lot of what you’ll find on Hive resembles the social media sites you know. We have a crapton of blogging sites (they all show more or less the same content, they just have different ways of showing it). These mostly look and feel like Facebook, or Medium, or a news site.
- 🙎 The big “Facebookish” ones are: Peakd, Ecency, InLeo. There are literally dozens out there though since it’s not too hard for a developer to make one.
- 📺 We also have a YouTube equivalent: 3Speak.tv
- 📸 An Instagram equivalent: Liketu
- 🐦 A bunch of X equivalents: dbuzz, InLeo Threads, Ecency Waves
- 🎥 A Twitch: Vimm
All these things, if you remember, are known as frontends. They all share the exact same info, just present it in different ways. If you make a post on Peakd, it will appear in Ecency and five dozen other sites that you will never visit or know about. 😄
Hive games look and feel like browser games. There are people working on a more sophisticated game launcher for more complex games too.
And then there are a couple hundred other projects that can look like normal sites or completely wacky things that make your head hurt. It’s fun, but important for newcomers to stay focused on just a few frontends at the start.
🚨 This is “web3” tech 🚨
A quick note before we talk about how all this ties back to supporting wrestling.
See, the technology that Hive stuff uses is—and stay with us—blockchain technology. Yeah yeah yeah, you’ve likely heard that crypto and blockchain shit is shady as fuck. Scams, bullshit, stupidly priced jpegs.
You know why you’ve never heard of Hive yet? Part of it is because we try to stay out of the blockchain and crypto shitstorm, and we use the technology the way it’s supposed to be used—to connect communities and applications together in a transparent, public, and useful way. We try to call this “web3” instead of “crypto.”
No shitstorm = low media attention. We’re hoping the good work we’re doing with supporting retired wrestling legends will be a positive news story one day. Let’s talk about that work.
💪 How our wrestlers benefit from Hive & WOO 💪
Wrestling Organization Online (WOO) is a wrestling game built on Hive. You collect wrestler cards, manage an organization, and participate in traveling around to territories and running matches. Our wrestling partners like Perry Saturn, Sonny Onoo, Raven, Terri Runnels, and many more can appear in-game as a collectible (they’re very rare though).
Those partners get a cut of the profits from the game. (In fact, we pay them first before any profits or staff wages.) We also involve them in real life events, get them gigs, and even book them for real shows if they’re interested.
So as a wrestling fan, if you play the game and trade the cards, you are indirectly helping support retired wrestlers.
Here’s the full list of our partner roster, by the way (Last Updated Feb 2024):
- Perry Saturn
- Raven
- Sonny Oono
- Terri Runnels
- Justin Credible
- Sabu
- Bill Alfonso
- Mikey Whipwreck
- Ernest “The Cat” Miller
- Tajiri
Connecting the wrestlers with fans, and letting them keep the value
We’re also keen to help our partners use Hive in whatever way they want to connect with fans. Take Mikey Whipwreck for example. He uses the blogging power of Hive to share stories about his life and wrestling (follow him here: @mikeywhipwreck). The Hive community assigns value to these posts, and Mikey gets a cut of that value.
- Blog by Mikey: Bobby did you call me Sheep Dick on live TV?
- Blog by Mikey: Second match in ECW but my first taste of Extreme
At the time of writing, that ECW blog had paid Mikey out about $45 worth of $HIVE assets. Here’s another example of the cool ‘shared’ nature of Hive—with that $45 of tokens, Mikey could:
- exchange them for $WOO tokens and use them to make his in-game organization better
- exchange them for $HBD tokens and put them in a Hive savings account (currently about 20% APY)
- stake the tokens as Hive Power so he has more say and sway in the Hive ecosystem
- cash them out for other kinds of crypto, or straight cash in his bank account
- any mix of the above, or 300 other things (we’re not gonna list 300 things)
Making “money” on Hive
You might read the above and be thinking: wait, I can get paid to blog?
Technically, yes. But don’t quit your day job. While every social post made on Hive has the potential to earn rewards, it is far from a guarantee. Like anything else in social media, it takes time, discipline, consistency, and a good dash of talent to build up anything substantial.
Take your time to get to know Hive, its communities, and the way the various things work. This will set you up to get the most out of your efforts here.
That said, let’s take a moment to talk about these rewards and the money—admittedly this is the part that usually gets people the most curious (shocking, right? 😉)
The Hive Reward Pool
Every 3 seconds, a small amount of $HIVE coins are printed out of thin air and added to a big Reward Pool. This printing gets less and less every year, and will stabilize around 2037.
When you make a post on Hive, or even a comment, people can upvote it or downvote it. Just like on other social sites like Reddit, Facebook, X, etc. Every upvote (or downvote) uses some fancy math to decide how much of the Reward Pool should “go” to the post. The biggest factor in the math is how many $HIVE coins the voter has staked (also known as Hive Power). More on staking a bit later.
After 7 days, the collective upvotes and downvotes and math is finalized, and a payout occurs. Let’s say you make a post and it is assigned to receive 3 $HIVE (about $1 in value at the time of writing). The 3 $HIVE is removed from the Reward Pool and:
- All the voters will split half (1.5 $HIVE)
- The author (you) gets the other half (1.5 $HIVE)
Half of your take (0.75 $HIVE) will be automatically staked as Hive Power to your account. The other half comes “liquid” in the form of either $HIVE or Hive Backed Dollars ($HBD).
We know that this probably raises more questions than answers. The Hive rewards system is one of the most interesting and complex aspects of this place, so we won’t take up more time in this guide getting into the weeds. There are many people and communities on Hive that can help you learn more, and we encourage you to join the WOO Discord and hit us with all your Hive questions. We’ll be patient with you, and if anyone gives you a hard time for being new, we’ll put ‘em on the top rope and powerbomb their ass.
Signing up for Hive: An important note
If you think this is something you want to be a part of—awesome. The first step is getting a Hive account.
Before you jump in, there are some really fuckin’ important things to know:
Above all else: these accounts are NOT like a regular social media account. For one, there is no simple “password recovery” system. We don’t even really use passwords here (more on that in a moment). But if you suck with remembering or keeping passwords straight… two pieces of advice:
- Don’t get involved until you get better at password shit. Seriously.
- If you must get involved, do not invest any serious money into your account.
Remember how no one owns Hive? No company or corporation? This boils down to each user being 100% responsible for their account security. You and you alone. If you forget your Facebook login—no problem, just do a reset. Facebook owns your data and they can go change it and get you a new password easy-peasy.
Hive does NOT own your data and there is nowhere to “go” to reset anything. Let that sink in.
. . .
. .
.
Okay, sunk in yet? Now it’s only fair to tell you we were being slightly dramatic. There actually is
an account recovery system but it is really goddamn tricky and hard to wrap your head around. You don’t want to have to go through it, and it has a good chance of failing if you don’t do everything perfectly.
Signing up for Hive Step 1: Make an account
Since there are hundreds of projects on Hive, there are just as many ways to create an account. Some ask for money, some are free but require an email. You’ve a lot of choices, depending on how anonymous you want to be.
We’ll assume that for your first steps in Hive, you aren’t opposed to using an email address or similar. We recommending signing up with:
- InLeo (lets you use Google or X to sign up)
- Ecency (free email sign up)
- DiscoverHive (small fee to sign up)
Your account name is also called your wallet address. “Wallet” is web3 lingo for account, basically. You’ll get used to it.
Signing up for Hive Step 2: Key Security 🔐
Instead of a password for your wallet, you are given four special keys. The keys are long strings of gibberish—very hard to remember and even type properly.
Whoever knows these keys effectively controls the wallet.
When you make a wallet, only you will have access to the keys. But if someone else gets a hold of them—they also “own” the wallet.
This is different from a password. Very very different. Might not seem different at first… but trust us. These keys are way more sensitive than a password. People who are huge crypto nerds (or have huge amounts of crypto) do things like etching these keys onto metal for safe storage. You probably don’t need to go that far today, but in general:
- Do not store your keys in a word document
- You can use a password manager program, but most people don’t recommend that either
- Most recommended: write them down on paper (do not print)
- People sometimes use metal because paper can get burned or ruined more easily
We realize this kind of sounds ridiculous. But when you really let it sink in that you and you alone are responsible for the security of your keys… well… going a little overkill to protect them can be worth it.
Signing up for Hive Step 3: Hive Keychain
Download the Hive Keychain browser extension—it will quickly become your best friend. You can (safely) type some or all of your private keys into it so that you don’t have to deal with typing them a hundred times a day.
Here is their site: https://hive-keychain.com/
The basics of using Hive
Okay, now that you know how to make a wallet, using your new Hive powers is fairly straightforward. Most sites and games behave like you’d expect them to. But there are a few “web3” terms and actions that are good to know about. You’ll encounter all of these soon enough.
Signing transactions
In the blockchain world, a “transaction” is a catchall term for “doing something that changes the blockchain.” Many Hive things require transactions, and you use your private keys to confirm that you are signing (confirming) the transaction.
Hive Keychain will pop up and ask you each time you’re required to sign. It takes care of the keys thing, and you can also ask it to stop bugging you if you’re doing a lot of transactions with an app that you trust.
Resource Credits (RC)
Hive isn’t the only web3 social thing out there, but it is one of the few that are FREE to use. See, most other crypto-social things require you to PAY FOR EVERY TRANSACTION, which, of course, is insane.
They’re getting better at lowering the cost to pennies, but we here on Hive prefer free.
The way we keep it free: we give everyone some free transaction credits (aka resource credits) every day. When you’re new, you don’t have a lot of RC so you might get some transaction errors.
To get more RC:
- Someone can lend you some of theirs (go here for a nice free pile)
- You can stake some $HIVE coins (you only need like 10 to give you enough RC to do most things)
Staking Hive for Hive Power (HP)
We’ve used this “staking” term a few times. Here’s what it means: you take some $HIVE coins and you lock them up so you can’t trade them. They’re locked up for a minimum of 13 weeks. When they’re locked up, they become “Hive Power” or HP, and grants you more say and sway over Hive.
To unstake, you just press a few buttons. The amount you want unstaked slowly trickles back into “liquid” $HIVE over the course of 13 weeks.
Staking gives you:
- More say in how Rewards get handed out (your votes are worth more)
- More RC
- More weight in governance—a topic we’ll touch on very briefly next
- About 3% per year in bonus HP (so if you stake 100, in a year you’ll have 103)
- The ability to delegate your HP to others (another huge topic but we won’t cover it here)
Hive Governance: The Witnesses
Final piece, as this damn thing is getting long (how was your beer?)
Hive is effectively maintained and run by a group of users called Witnesses. These folks or groups run special servers (called nodes) that make all of Hive… work. Anyone can be a Witness provided they have the technical skills to run those nodes.
There are hundreds of Witnesses but the Top 20 Witnesses matter the most.
Every wallet gets to vote for 30 Witnesses. The weight of your vote is your Hive Power. Many Hive users don’t even care about this, but they sure as shit should, because all the good and bad and crazy and fun of Hive boils down to how these Witnesses operate.
WOO itself runs a Witness node, and we’d love your vote. But you also shouldn’t vote for us just because we asked nicely. You should only do it if you agree with what we’re doing for Hive and if you like our node setup (most people have no clue how to rate a node setup. Another topic for another time).
The End
Well, for you, hopefully a bright new Beginning here on Hive.
We know you have more questions, and as chunky as this thing was, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of Hive and its possibilities. Come ask your questions in the WOO Discord! We also recommend TheTerminal—a Hive Discord for newbies to get oriented. The folks there are super super nice.
To learn more about Wrestling Organization Online and join our vibrant community, visit our official website here. Let's take wrestling gaming to new heights together! 💪
Disclaimer: WOO related assets are for entertainment purposes only and are not a financial offer. Remember to always do your own research and make informed decisions.
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