Hive has a lot of interesting prospects lately.
We've been developing quite of bit of infra in terms of second-layer tech, wrapping technology, and even smart contracts. Of course infrastructure isn't exactly sexy. Nobody looks at a new road and thinks, "Wow this is amazing; this is exactly what I needed!" A road is just a road; they are everywhere. The only people who think they are amazing are the people who don't have them in abundance. Those who have these things let them fall into the background to be forgotten (until they stop working and the road is full of potholes). Such is the nature of infra.
https://x.com/vsc_eco/status/1882811767149215953
VSC proxy wallets
VSC is a project I have been sleeping on for a while and really need to learn more about, but I'm starting to be shown the ropes... and let me tell you it's a very large scope piece of technology that could propel the network to great heights.
How could you possibly send non-Bitcoin assets to a Bitcoin wallet?
When I first saw this tweet two weeks ago I thought, "Wow, that sounds pretty crazy... but it also makes sense." By leveraging the strengths of Hive we are creating a system where a Hive account is a powerful abstraction that can store any cryptocurrency we attach to it on the second layer.
I hadn't even considered the ability to send any currency to a Bitcoin wallet. How is this possible? Well, the Bitcoin address is connected to a Hive account. We can lock assets on the second layer, but rather than unlocking/moving those assets with our active key... we can allow it to be done with any compatible key that we choose. This is what VSC is seeking to achieve here: send any token to any address and it can be unlocked with that address' private key.
Have a friend that likes to game on AVAX?
You could send them any asset to their AVAX wallet. They could then come here and claim it using Metamask or another EVM wallet. This may not sound like a big deal to some but it's very impressive interoperability. I'm sure people from other chains would be floored to find an ecosystem in which their CURRENT private keys unlock an entirely new platform they didn't even realize existed before. It's powerful.
How does the security work on VSC?
This is something I need to do a lot more research on, but it's unimportant for the time being while we discuss what the frontend user experience will be like. I'm told the collateral system that governs VSC uses https://www.xclaim.io/ as a template. I'll have to look more into this some other time.
What else?
Well if users on other platforms can come here and use keys that they already have: this greatly reduces the onboarding dilemma that The Swarm has faced for the better part of a decade. It has not been a trivial task to teach people about multi-key tiered security (owner/active/posting/memo/[master]). If they could just log in with their Bitcoin key or EVM key using a hardware wallet this would greatly reduce the friction we've been seeing.
On top of all this: very few crypto communities actually have a place to communicate. Most of them are on Twitter getting gaslit by Elon Musk about free speech when we've already seem him flex his power in a toxic way multiple times. The algorithm itself was never open-sourced and is gamed into the ground while the Hive community has clearly been unfairly shadow-banned as a competitor.
Without a technology similar to VSC it is essentially impossible to onboard other communities to our chain because they don't want to learn a new thing. They already have their thing and they already have their community. We can lean into these desires by providing them access to a proxy space that LOOKS like their network, but is actually our network. If we build it: they will come.
Already LEO has onboarded the DASH community in a very similar way. Users on DASH can login with their keys and even earn DASH by proxy via posting through automated routing on LEODEX.
Now obviously some users on Hive are going to be very annoyed if they see developments like these... because of course we want these new users to be stacking Hive and learning about what we have going on here... not just login to a lite account and cashout without even knowing how it works.
And to that I would say: either our business model works... or it doesn't and we need to fix it. If users want bandwidth on the Hive blockchain then they need resource credits. If they want resource credits they're going to need to farm them with powered up Hive or buy a delegation. They don't even need to know they have powered up Hive. Just like LEO allows DASH to earn DASH by proxy, so to can a DEX allow DASH users to stack Hive Power and resource credits without even them knowing about it [at first].
Conclusion
Hive needs to be an extroverted network. We've really struggled with this in the past as the way many other networks have achieved such interoperability was some kind of risky shortcut, centralized nonsense, or too big of a burden for the main chain to handle at scale. @VSC.network looks like it could be the real deal as it seems to be addressing all these issues at once.