As someone who has been among the most positive on Hive year on year and through thick and thin, putting my stake where my mouth is (stake is your voice they say), the performance of the price of Hive is something that is never too far from my thoughts. Hive is about a year old now, the chain is five years and I have been adding to it for a little over four years, daily. I want it to do well.
Last night I wrote a post on the release of Leo Finance's CUB token and mining pools and Nonames, left this comment about when all of these second-layer activities are going to have an impact on the value of Hive.
On the price, I have no idea. But I hope soon - as I have hoped for the last 3.5 years and since I started to actually learn about Hive and the potential of crypto and a decentralized, blockchain community. This is where the value steps in however, and Leo Finance and other applications and services have been increasing the value of Hive for some time now. Even though price doesn't seem to move much (it is up 250% year to date), the value of being on Hive is increasing daily through the activities of the community, not just the ones that have a return either.
But in regards to financial matters that generally take precedence:
CUB is a new token and currently sits at amazingly, 11 dollars each. That isn't the interesting thing though - the total value is. At time of writing, there is 4.1M dollars worth staked on https://cubdefi.com/ which means there is about 2.3 million staked that isn't CUB tokens. The platform has been live for about half a day and has already attracted a very respectable amount of stake to it.
The Leo Finance team is active and passionate - but, would it have been possible to do it without the Hive community? I don't think so and I am not just talking about the last 24 hours, I mean from inception to today, a two year plus journey. This is the power of having a socialized platform that not only has its own economy, but also leverages the economies of all others in the crypto space, as people tend to diversify both outwardly from Hive and inwardly to Hive. Currently, there might be more going out than in, but will that always be the case? I believe not, as in time there is going to be an increasing number of applications attracted to a fast and feeless ecosystem with a knowledgeable and active community willing to back the stuff that they believe in.
Integrate DeFi into the Hive blockchain and have that as a leverageable core for second-layer DeFi applications to utilize as well, and things can increase in both value and price very quickly. One of the challenges is that at the moment, there are some crazy opportunities to get inflated gains on APR, making holding Hive stake somewhat unattractive in comparison, as it "only" offers about 15% through curation. But essentially, Hive already has a mining pool in operation where people stake and gain access to the inflation, but the same stake could potentially concurrently act as a DeFi pool to take advantage of other opportunities. This would mean that holding HIVE as stake doesn't mean missing out on other opportunities, it means increasing those opportunities by that 15% a year on top of whatever the others are offering.
With the community aspect involved and the ease of which second-layer applications are able to built upon the Hive blockchain without having to worry about transfer fees at all on platform and very, very low and static transfer fees between exchanges, it could attract a whole range of new development in both the DeFi areas and the applications that people love to use, all with the security and speed that the Hive blockchain provides, as well as the community as a platform to build upon and attract users to use case.
The challenge with the price of Hive currently is not only convincing investors to buy it, but also to stake it, in an environment where they are able to get a better (albeit riskier perhaps) return on their investment. Expanding the utility of the HIVE token to be able to directly and simply take part in DeFi, would give a great deal of incentive to buy, as it is not only a project that has a proven track record of users, it has a track record of users who have proven themselves relatively stable, through the ups and downs. With a lot of these projects, n one knows who is who, but with Hive, people can be assured that no one is going anywhere fast, not only because of the current 13 week powerdown, but also because it is highly decentralized with value spread wide and a lot of the users love being on Hive.
The practical considerations of this would of course need to be looked into, but I think that Hive already has some assets like the savings wallet that it could leverage and adjust to become a DeFi holding pool, using smart contracts to make claim on the contents, but having it all accessible behind the account holder's keys, rather than trust it to a third-party application.
The community of people on Hive is very, very valuable - but their value doesn't translate into price directly, their activity does and it isn't about each post value, it is about what the community can accomplish together and how it is able to encourage others to join in the movement. As this is a decentralized environment, the "movement" is movements and can move forward in many directions simultaneously, but for people to take part, they will have to be convinced and we all work on incentive of some kind. That incentive might be monetary, it might be social, it might be for the sense of security - but there has to be some reason behind why we do what we do.
As Hive is a general level blockchain, it is able to be used in a multitude of ways and the more it can grow its usecases, the more opportunity it has to capture users, with more users spreading throughout the ecosystem to further strengthen and grow it upward in price and outward in appeal.
Hive is the most awesome crypto community out there, it is just that either many people do not know it or haven't understood it for what it is and will continue to grow into. We are human and are often distracted by the new and shiny, but at the end of the day, we will settle down on what gives us a home.
Hive is Home.
When people take ownership of a home, it is where they will invest a lot of their time, energy and money. The return on HIVE is more than financial, it is social, personal and in time, it will tie these three things together in such a compelling way, that taking part and adding value will be the most basic investment a person can make, with a return that competes in ways very little else can.
Things are looking good and price will follow. When?
That is up to us and what we do as a community to build it.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]