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This is the #109th edition of the "Week through Adrian's Lenses" weekly Hive and crypto news roundup.
Let's see what we have for this week. We cover:
Hive
- Hive Debit Card
- HIVE Listing?
- Value Plan
- INLEO
- Hive-Engine
- Core Devs Meeting
- POSH
- Hive Tools
- Brit List
- Hyper Rail Blaster
- dCity
- Ragnarok
Crypto
- Bitcoin / USDT
- Trump / ETH
Week on Hive
16 of 27 tracked posts made it to this week's issue of the "Week on Hive" roundup.
In the Spotlight
Continuing the Story of the Hive Debit Card
The work on testing and fine tuning what was called Hive Debit Card continued this week.
The two guys involved, @jthomasewsky and @starkerz, tested payment of Lightning invoices at a bar using the Hive Debit Card, so "for real", instead of in a controlled environment, and it worked perfectly.
So, both HBD and Lightning payments have been tested and they work using the Hive card.
What's next we can find from the young programmer himself, in a post from yesterday. It is likely the Hive debit cards won't be for free, but they will try to make them affordable.
It's also interesting to find out that @jthomasewsky is in fact a Bitcoin maxi, who respects Hive because of its stablecoin.
Speaking of bitcoin, @starkerz went to El Salvador with @missbitcoin-sv to meet some bitcoiners, including Plan B.
Marketing / Awareness / Branding
New Listing for HIVE?
An announcement was shared by Hive's official X account about HIVE on ProBit Global. I'm not sure from the post if it's a new listing, or if the exchange wanted to bring some eye balls on HIVE which they had already listed to increase the trading volume.
Value Plan Asking for Q1 Funding ...
Like everything about disbursement of funds, especially in a lackluster market, Value Plan is under intense scrutiny.
If we look at their general strategy for 2025 there are some changes compared to 2024. Maybe not as much as many would want, maybe some high spending items people often have an issue with haven't been eliminated (but they have been reduced). I'd like to see how the B2B elements, mainly focusing on remote business onboarding (and claims) for Distriator, and VSC will turn out.
This is their proposal. They ask for 250,000 USD for Q1. Probably more, if they'll come with a bridge proposal later.
INLEO Marketing Proposal... Drama
Another proposal that generated some backlash from a number of big stakeholders, seen in how the numbers fluctuated on the proposal and the return proposal and the posts to dispute the numbers presented by INLEO as accomplishments for last year. The heated responses from Khal to one of these posts probably didn't help either.
The (updated) proposal asks/asked for roughly 250,000 USD for the entire year of 2025 (226,570 USD remaining at the time of writing, most of the rest wasn't funded), to partner with 10 big crypto ecosystems on the model of INLEO-Dash. The proposal mentions the funds will exclusively be used for co-marketing with the respective ecosystems (while Inleo would add the same amount as the DHF by themselves).
After the debates regarding number of users, Inleo created a stats page on their platform, with their numbers. I disagree with one thing. They should not call them "Monthly Active Creators (MACs)", they should call them Monthly Active Users (MAUs), since they are both creators and consumers (who are Hive users), as the tooltip discloses correctly. Khal also mentioned it would be possible to download the full data using a button. Maybe they haven't added it yet, because I don't see it.
Governance / Development / Dapps / Education
Hive-Engine Under a Spam Attack
Hive-Engine has been under a spam attack of small transactions recently. The backlog of transactions has been cleared (except withdrawals and deposits, for now), but it looks like the attacker is persistent and may be gearing up to attack again. From the chosen usernames, they may have something against @aggroed himself, rather than Hive-Engine. More details here or on discord.
All bad is for the good. Shows some immediate attacking vectors against Hive-Engine that can be stopped, and some lessons to be drawn. Probably not everything can be mitigated on a L2/sidechain, no matter how decentralized or centralized it is.
Hive Core Devs Meeting
A new Hive core devs meeting took place. This is the recording.
Right at the beginning, there was a brief mention regarding some DHF inflation change... I have no idea what that is about but could be important! I wonder if it has something to do with @dalz's post from a while back.
There will likely be a v1.27 release with new features and v1.28 with the HF. Hard fork date was not set.
Update About POSH Distribution
To incentivize people sharing Hive posts on Reddit, more POSH will go to them, based on certain contests. The post also describes what will happen once the max cap of POSH will be reached: POSH will be purchased from the market to be distributed. They already have a stash of POSH.
At the end, they talk about a tool that is being worked on by @hivetrending to automatically check when Hive posts are shared on other networks. That sounds very useful to quantify external reach of Hive posts.
Speaking of sharing on Reddit, here are the results of the latest contest.
Nice Little Tool
Within the Hive Tools collection of small tools that @ecoinstant shared not so long ago, Backlinks Generator could be interesting for people who keep a table with their posts or want to create an index with them. He is talking about it here, and also how you could pay him to get your own idea developed.
The Brit List Got Updated
The "original" list, from where all the other country-based lists were spawned has been updated for February. Steve is doing a great job keeping these lists updated, and I don't think the breakdown of locations as he presents them are based mostly on the profile, but more on feedback and personal conversations.
Games
Hyper Rail Blaster Requests Funding from Arcade Colony DAO
We have an Arcade Colony DAO proposal for the Hyper Rail Blaster, requesting 15m COLONY yearly for 5 years. Looks like the proposal is voted massively in favor and will likely pass. I tried out the game, it is simple and can be fun.
A "mobile-first" Market for dCity Was Launched
@ecoinstant let us know of a mobile-first market for dCity which was just launched. I looked around and it seems nice. But like him, I checked it out from my laptop, not from a mobile device.
Ragnarok Update
Dan talks about Ragnarok to remind people some details about the game, but also to say why he likes challenging games and why he chose to make Ragnarok like that and not an easy one. Here's his talk.
Week in the Crypto World
Bitcoin Will Have a Stablecoin
Stablecoins are likely what will push the crypto space further as means of payment. And that will be for a good while forward, whether we would like a pure crypto to have this role or not, now or in the future.
In this context, Bitcoin didn't have any stablecoin. And still, Bitcoin maxis thought it would be enough to be embraced as a payment option of global relevance. Maybe it would have, but likely it wouldn't have, for a pretty long time, if at all.
In the meantime, Tether saw the opportunity, and is embedding USDT into Bitcoin, both at the base layer and at the Lightning network layer. This is a major change for the Bitcoin network. Bitcoiners don't have to go outside their network to find a stablecoin.
It is also a development others will likely follow, since I doubt USDT will be the only one with direct access to the Bitcoin network.
Eric Trump Shills Ethereum (sort of)
Following his tweet saying "In my opinion, it’s a great time to add $ETH." from Tuesday, ETH jumped pretty nicely intra-day even as most everything else turned red. Also, it appears Ethereum ETFs started to see some inflows as a result.
List of Older "Week through Adrian's Lenses" posts
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