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This is the #74th 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
- Rising Star
- Open Genie
- Hive Global Distribution
- INLEO
- Social.Gifts
- DBOND
- Rise of the Pixels
- dCity
- Golem Overlord
- Collaborations
Crypto
- Bitstamp, Robinhood
- BNB Chain
Week on Hive
15 of 24 tracked posts made it to this week's issue of the "Week on Hive" roundup.
In the Spotlight
Rising Star Expands Beyond Hive
I've seen much enthusiasm about Rising Star, its development and model, where gaming is an integral part into supporting real music production distributed through their website. It's also free to play, a model hard to come by in Web 3 that resisted any reasonable amount of time, and yet they did.
They went through their hard times, and inflation on their reward token, STARBITS reached significant numbers, but looks like their burning mechanism through their Music Promoter mission (which burns STARBITS and creates STARPRO) works pretty well lately. It helps that demand for STARPRO increased a lot driven by new use cases in the game.
You might also remember that I reported about recent developments with the game too, so things evolve with the game.
I came across an interesting post regarding Rising Star this week. It wasn't published by the Rising Star team, but it was distributed in discord and Jux - the founder of Rising Star - shared it to everyone.
The post talks about a PR campaign for Rising Star in the wider fintech space, which already started. A PR firm specialized in fintech has been contracted for this purpose.
I hope their campaign will be successful, although to me it seems the target audience may be too broad.
Also, a Rising Star bridge is built by Blockchain Gaming Technologies (so not by the Rising Star team), that will allow STARPRO to be moved and traded in other ecosystems. For now, a token contract was created on Polygon named SPRO, and a pool with USDC on QuickSwap was also created. That's a good choice of a pool, since on Hive-Engine STARPRO trades against HIVE, which theoretically is volatile. I always thought the option to trade against HBD too would have been great.
The process seems to be manual for now (involving @wagginston and Blockchain Gaming Technologies) when moving STARPRO from HE to Polygon or vice versa.
I suggest to read the original announcement, if this piece of news made you curious.
Marketing / Awareness / Branding
Peak Open Prepared to Fund Marketing for Open Genie
Up to 5000 HBD can be earned for properly marketing Open Genie to the crypto community. Here are the details.
Global Distribution of Hivers
@enrique89 put together a report regarding the geographical distribution of Hivers, as well as the languages most used on our blockchain, based on available data. By watching the search parameters used, I can't help but notice some countries with good concentrations of Hivers missing, like the Philippines, Nigeria, Ghana. Whether they are or not using identifiable locations, that's another question.
It's not the first time I have seen calls for a better collection of location data. While I understand how this can improve targeting and customizing marketing to different areas based on Hive's penetration and awareness among the local population, tracking methods used in advertising is one reason why many chose to either abandon (block) or reduce exposure to that kind of a world. And to think work is being done that advertiser tracking would not be be blockable in the future. But that's a subject for a separate post...
Governance / Development / Dapps
INLEO Fixed Over 100 Bugs Recently
That's a lot of bugs to get squashed at once or in a short period.
From what Khal mentioned, that's the majority of the known ones (103 fixed out of 109) at the end of May. But in the meantime others were discovered. Without knowing any details, I'd say fixing so many bugs at once may have introduced a few others that were not caught during internal testing.
They are also moving from a period of intensive bug hunting and fixing to more feature development, and bug fixes as they are discovered.
The first new feature they added was Premium subscription for 1 year (with a 16% discount, or better said, paying 10 out of 12 months, 100 HBD instead of 120).
Updates to Social.Gifts (Waivio)
Social.Gifts introduced admin delegations, that allow a website to be maintained by different admins in different sections (objects, as they are called in Waivio).
Another development is the possibility to add crypto addresses to businesses, and facilitate payments to them (via QR codes).
As someone who haven't used Waivio yet but I recognize its potential, I wonder why was the "social.gifts" domain name chosen?
DAB Curation Trail
A new way to mint DBOND will be available, if you delegate HP to @dab-vote. Read all about it here. There's a "hidden" section for Club members too...
Games
Rise of the Pixels Updates
The RotP team created a getting started guide that mostly likely is needed for potential new players who might want to try out the game.
They also presented their game development updates, mainly the addition of a new "indie" game category, updating the rating algorithm in a way that increases the "likelihood of diverse genre/theme/platform combinations achieving good ratings". They also added a new payment gateway option (Sellix) into the shop.
dCity Updates
The president's tax limits have been changed in a way that significantly decreases the maximum tax they can set. That will allow players with a Law Firm to earn SIM from income (again).
Soldiers, policemen, and drone factories will now increase social support, which overall will increase 3x, but if SIM price goes up this multiplier will be decreased.
Law Firm effect on taxes will be a fixed 5% going forward, after the related changes that reduce taxes.
A new combined building has been introduced too (Law Coorporation).
Here are all the details.
Golem Overlord Updates
GO introduced a series of updates for guild play. This is one of the updates. If you are interested, I suggest to read all of them.
Meetings / Events / Communities
Mini Collaborations Throughout Hive
Following the announcement of collaboration between INLEO and CENT from last week, a few more announcements came this week:
Also. Immortal Creed put out a proposal to the SPS DAO regarding a collaboration with Splinterlands. Basically, a cross-community promotion: a sale of Immortal Creed packs for DEC, where the DEC received through the sale of packs would be burned. I'm not sure if the proposal will be approved or not, but they already reached their purpose and were invited at one of the popular Splinterlands shows.
Week in the Crypto World
Bitstamp to be Sold to Robinhood
Founded in 2011, the UK-based Bitstamp is one of the oldest CEXes in crypto still standing, and one of the largest in Europe.
Robinhood has been a very popular retail platform for both stocks and recently, crypto, but it's not far from scandals where they were accused of market manipulation (GME scandal).
It looks like Robinhood tried to get its license to operate in the UK twice in the past and failed. But the other way to get a license in the UK is to buy a business that has one. And Bitstamp is more than a license holder, it is a top exchange. The price of 200m USD (all-cash deal) shows how much Robinhood wants to expand outside the US. Read more about the deal.
BNB at All-Time Highs
With all the issues Binance and CZ have been facing lately, many (including myself) might've taken their eyes off Binance Smart Chain and BNB.
Interestingly, BNB made a new ATH this week and it's holding pretty close to it and the 700$ mark it crossed. This comes on the background of a surge in TVL on the BNB Chain (so not BSC) by 460m USD in the last 30 days (+10%).
The TVL on BNB Chain increased by 68% since the beginning of the year, and transaction activity went up by 22% in the last two weeks we also find out from this Decrypt article.
Full list of "Week through Adrian's Lenses" posts
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