This is the #56th edition of the "Week through Adrian's Lenses" weekly Hive and crypto news roundup.
Let's see what we have for this week.
Week on Hive
21 of 41 tracked posts made it to this week's issue of the "Week on Hive" roundup.
In the Spotlight
Invenium Is Preparing to Launch a New Platform (Whitepaper) and the First Game on It
Invenium Corp., the wholly-owned subsidiary of Splinterlands that runs the Genesis League Sports platform and the Goals game on it (in partnership with MSLPA), made some major announcements this week.
What started with a Discord announcement and a Twitter storm from the CEO of Invenium, Jesse "Aggroed" Reich, was expanded into two subsequent full posts on Hive:
- Invennium Corporation announces the creation and launch of Arcade Colony and Moon Karts
- Arcade Colony White Paper
From the first post, among other things, we find out the name and style of the first game that will run on Arcade Colony, Moon Shots, which seems to be inspired by a popular game series, Mario Kart.
If you'd like to see a teaser for the new game, here it is.
The whitepaper obviously describes the Arcade Colony more in detail, including who is expected to be for and the levels of integration it will offer, as well as the tokenomics, including fork rewards and airdrops.
Speaking of Aggroed, the CEO of Invenium, looks like he participated in one of the Killer Whales TV shows from the new season, which will start airing on February 8th. The show seems to be about Splinterlands. not about anything going on in Invenium.
Governance / Development / Dapps
Blocktrades: Notice for HAF App Devs
Blocktrades published his first report from 2024, focusing only on relevant changes for HAF app developers, and not on his team's ongoing work. He mentioned this focus on dev-related changes is important shortly before almost everything they've worked on is getting ready to be released, and said that the next steps would be to tag the release candidates and then set up a test node for apps that don't have their own API nodes.
Inleo AMA Focused on Long-Form Content
This week's Inleo AMA was focused on LeoAds and how can people shift the focus of their long-form content so that it becomes eligible for evergreen rewards. From LeoAds revenue, 80% will be for evergreen rewards and 20% for active stakeholders, which puts a high emphasis on the former, which brings more eyeballs to the platform and generates ad revenue.
Mobile App Updates from Ecency and 3Speak
Both Ecency and 3Speak came out this week with updates on their mobile apps. Check out the links if you want to see details on what's new.
News from Actifit
I haven't mentioned Actifit in a while in these reports. Here came the time to do it twice in one week.
First, Actifit owner, @mcfarhat was interviewed, and if you are looking for news about the project or want to know how to get involved, it seems like a good starting point.
Then, in what looks like a joint effort with @dbuzz, @actifit will sponsor a Zumba event in Davao City.
D.Buzz Over 500 Users Threshold
@chisrice shared that D.Buzz now has over 500 users.
How to Change Vote Weight on Tribes
@themarkymark published instructions that anyone can follow on how to change the voting weight multiplier on tribes. Nice one, especially with leodex out of the picture!
Marketing / Awareness / Branding
Hive Rally Car Finished the Monte Carlo Rallye
Despite some technical issues on two stages from Saturday, our team finished the Monte Carlo Rallye, where they participated for the first time. From @lordbutterfly's report (including the after movie), we find out that the team was doing quite well before the technical difficulties, being in front of a few other crews a few classes higher. And these are the first impressions of our driver, shared after a long nine days of driving.
Freechain Won Its First Film Festival Award
Although @lordbutterfly didn't mention it, I suppose it's pretty clear it is for the festival it was enrolled in and we could vote for at the beginning of the year.
Freechain won the audience award, being the most-voted film, but not the judges' award, which went to a film without any vote.
Games
A Conversation with Yabapmatt
If you'd like to hear Matt in a different format than the usual Splinterlands Town Hall, this is a sort of interview by @thepeoplesguild in which many topics are touched upon, some of them you might already be familiar with if you listen to town halls regularly, others may be said for the first time or in a different way. Almost two hours that may be worth listening to.
Time for Retzark Whitepaper
Retzark, the game the DBuzz team has been involved with, officially published the whitepaper of the game. Interestingly, it's free to play with common cards. Seems like ghost cards in Splinterlands, but theoretically you earn rewards using only common cards in Retzark. Something I haven't seen anywhere else on Hive is a sort of betting system to be able to advance on the leaderboard. There is an airdrop too, for DBuzz users.
Holozing News
Holozing explains how the token distribution changes after the POSH claim drop has ended and the diesel pool rewards have been lowered (by about 25%) to accommodate new pools on two different chains, yet to be announced officially (but probably BSC and Ethereum, BSC almost certain). After collection rewards will begin, the ZING inflation return to the previous level of 300k daily, from 250k daily now.
From the same announcement, we find out that Holozing plans to add a community beneficiary funding mechanism, applied to posts that are published in the Holozing community. This will fund a growing team of collaborators.
The game also added a fan art section, as announced here.
WOO Game Introduces a 5% Beneficiary
The new beneficiary reward will be added to the WOO Game Hive community and used for business purposes.
'Meetings / Events / Communities'
Note that some of the news related to future events or communities can be found above, but I had to choose one category to place them in.
HBD Payments in Sucre
I thought I should share this weekly summary of Sucre users paying with HBD, and recording themselves as they do that. I'm not sure if these are all of them or just a curation.
Week in the Crypto World
Transak Partners with Visa to Become an Off-Ramp in 145 Countries
I think this is a pretty big deal since off-ramps are quite rare in crypto. Transak is already integrated on Splinterlands (for SPS and DEC) and PeakD (to buy HIVE), but I haven't used it yet. It is integrated with many other ecosystems as well. The last time I heard about them, there were some complaints about high fees. I haven't checked, so this may still be an issue if it ever was. But what I assume, is that this is just the beginning. And where there is one, others will follow and fees will inevitably drop, to some extent.
Old Revived Narrative: Bitcoin is Bad Because It Consumes Too Much Energy
We have to make a distinction. For banks and Wall Street, Bitcoin is a new asset class, not a new technology. And they might even be ok with the pollution narrative stuck on Bitcoin. They don't really need Bitcoin, the technology, or the miners, to build up the asset class and its derivatives. So, a move to survey the electricity usage of Bitcoin miners by the Biden administration doesn't surprise me.