After Splinterlands took off incredibly at the end of the last bull market, we could hear stuff like: "We need 100 Splinterlands for Hive to really shine".
That might be true, and we might shine with 50 or 10 "Splinterlands", but let's not forget what happened during the incredible growth of Splinterlands.
I may be reporting them in the wrong order, but all of them happened in the course of a few months while the number of accounts and activity of Splinterlands grew exponentially.
First of all, Splinterlands ran out of account claim tokens relatively quickly. While they implemented a different solution, I believe other holders of major account claim tokens were creating accounts for Splinterlands for a short period.
Their solution was to remove account claim tokens from the equation completely because this only works when the flux of new accounts created is predictable. It will lead to blockage if a huge number of accounts is created in a short period of time, which is what happened during that period.
The advantage of Splinterlands was that it had a product (the Summoner's Spellbook), which was transformed into a gateway to creating a new account. And the price for that product was enough (10$) to cover the creation fee for a Hive account. Therefore, at that time they burned 3$ worth of HIVE to create every account that purchased the spellbook.
I'm not sure if now that the flow of new users has slowed down, the option to burn HIVE to create new accounts is still used or if they are using account claim tokens again. But if the craziness starts again, they have the option already built in.
What else happened back then? Despite Splinterlands having their own nodes, as far as I know, the blockchain (nodes) simply couldn't process as many transactions as they were pushing in a manner that didn't degrade the player's experience to a great degree.
Two things happened. First, Splinterlands took off-chain all game-related operations and left on-chain only market operations (all operations involving assets).
That pretty much solved the problem.
The other thing that happened was that Blocktrades' team discovered an issue in the core code that would prevent some operations to be handled in parallel, as they should. They fixed that.
Why the history lesson?
Because we are about to repeat it.
This time it's not Splinterlands, it's Leofinance, and it's not a huge number of users onboarded yet, but it is a significantly increased activity level.
It is very important to think this through for scaling because it happens at 1000 or so users. Splinterlands went from 20,000 to 500,000 MAU in the course of a few months.
It is also important to take into consideration the differences between Splinterlands and Leofinance (Threads, in particular, for the activity).
One difference is that, unlike Splinterlands, it makes little sense to have multiple accounts on Leofinance (Threads), unless you split them by categories of content. But the impact on the nodes for one very active account from Threads is higher than it was for Splinterlands when it had everything on-chain. Because a comment is heavier on resource credits than a custom JSON.
I just listened to the Leofinance AMA. Looks like because of the increased activity, API nodes are adding limitations to Leofinance (i.e. Threads). Khal was considering rebalancing the load between multiple nodes or having their own node or both.
Looks like some decisions need to be made and whatever they do, it will probably be a stressful period for them.
Let's return to the question in the title.
Is Hive Ready to Handle Bursts of Activity?
I believe the answer is a clear no. But within the crypto-sphere, Hive is one of the most prepared ones, already being a top 3 blockchain by activity for a long time, and with room to scale up.
To be fair, I don't believe any business can be ready for a sudden burst in activity or sales. That's why preparations are needed in anticipation, collaboration, and understanding when things start to break because of such a situation. Plus swift action when it hits you, usually at the worst time for you.