The VSC Network published yesterday a very important update on how HBD can be used on their network, and I can say I am very excited about it since.
Many of us felt HBD needed more use cases to truly shine. I love HIVE, the token, but I always thought it and HIVE Power had almost all the use cases in the Hive ecosystem, with HBD at a distant second, and that after some use cases for it have been added. Before that (mainly on the legacy chain), it was everyone's joke.
What the VSC team did was to shift the focus from HIVE to HBD on their network. Note that even on Hive-Engine SWAP.HBD is practically nonexistent as a point of interest, SWAP.HIVE is the only reference token around which everything revolves.
In my opinion, we are way too soon to have prices set in a volatile coin only and not develop strong use cases for the stable coin in your ecosystem, a layer 1 coin nonetheless.
I said above that the VSC team shifted the focus from HIVE to HBD on VSC Network. Not only that, without the burden of some of the use cases of HP, they could play around and create something way more flexible for HBD.
First, you can manually stake HBD on VSC. For that you receive sHBD tokens (1 sHBD = 1 HBD plus interest paid in HBD Savings). You will be able to USE those sHBD in different defi apps that will grow using VSC, despite the associated HBD being locked into savings. I imagine you could sell it on a bonds market or use it to buy a coin at a certain time without waiting for an unlock period to pass to have access to the HBD, or to pair it with another token in a pool. Why not integrate sHBD into v4v.app and maybe Keychain Store too, when the time comes? All while the underlying HBD is locked in the HBD savings. Why does it work? Because whoever holds the sHBD or parts of it can unlock the HBD. So, if after some changing hands of the sHBD, the underlying HBD will eventually end up in the hands of the sHBD holders, as anyone with a share of that sHBD unstakes it.
Then, we would have Resource Credits (RCs) on VSC, much like on Hive. That is great news to me, as the initial plans were to have fixed amount of fees in HBD, from what I recall. But this is where the comparison to Hive ends. On Hive you get RCs for staked HIVE, on VSC you get RCs for liquid HBD in your account. As RCs are depleted, depending on the cost of each operation, part of your liquid HBD is automatically staked for a while, and then unstaked also automatically, to pay for that transaction cost. I assume the staked HBD in this case generate interest that will pay for the transaction cost, because it will not be paid to the user. Only manually staked HBD pays out interest to the user.
This is quite an ingenious system. I'm curious if the RC system on VSC is tweaked to stake higher percentages of the available liquid HBD for a shorter time or lower percentages for a longer time. Or if the user can set a preference, in this case.
All this is exciting to me and fantastic news to the Hive ecosystem, in my opinion! Unfortunately, development takes time, and after VSC would have released these features into the wild and they were stable, other third party developers would need to take over and integrate all these great features into their apps. Hopefully, they have already started taken a look and maybe even experimenting with things in this early stage.