Week through Adrian's Lenses (01-07 February 2025)

in #hive-16792214 days ago

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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.


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The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people( @blkchn ) sharing the post on Reddit as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com. Otherwise, rewards go to the author of the blog post.

@tipu curate

Thanks for the curation!

Cheers for the updates. The Britlist is a combination of scripts and detective work. I get people letting me know of candidates and corrections. It's all in a big text file. Other people have taken on the lists for a couple of countries and I'd be happy to see more do that.

That's the secret ingredient - the detective work. The scripts probably give you a list of candidates, and then you refine the list and their locations to be more helpful.

I'd love my script to find a load more, but it's slim pickings lately. I do check each I find and some are obviously in other countries. Why lie?

Why lie?

VPNs or new arrivals in UK not speaking English well? Or they are used to lie about their location for whatever reason... But I don't understand why they would do it on Hive. Location is optional on profile.

I check their posts. Some show no sign of being here

To be very honest that's an outrageous sum value plan is asking for. It's at that stage of the market where we should be trying to grow the ecosystem and not spending so much without that much accountability. I don't know who vote these proposals, but I think it's definitely too much money. Everyone is beginning to wake up though and I hope we can do something

Accountability is important, I agree. And when things are kind of blurry or when some things that are paid for don't live up to expectations or seem inappropriate, it doesn't help. Otherwise, people have always pushed for more marketing in the Hive ecosystem. Let's not forget that either.

In reality more marketing includes details, proof and results. Personally I just think we're at that situation where we need to do better. 10k a day is unbelievable

I agree that both results (in many cases) and proofs are rather thin.

It looks like a decent amount of discussion over the DHF proposals. I think it was bound to happen given how the spending is there. They need to make sure that its a reasonable amount and that the results are impactful enough for the money spent.

Unfortunately, costs have gone wild in the world altogether. I kind of understand both sides. Marketing is not accounting, but it has to be mindful of how it spends its budget, or it gets slashed. But without marketing, we won't even be heard by our neighbors due to the incredible noise in the crypto space.

The Hive debit card is very interesting to me

Yes, I like it too. Now, all we need is places where we could use it. Where I am, there are slight chances to use it in real stores in the immediate future, but if they roll out remote business onboarding and claiming rewards for Distriator, that's an opportunity many would likely take from all over the world.

I have a black box approach to evaluating marketing projects. Ultimately what matters is acquisition cost per user and revenue/investment/activity per users.

“The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices. […] They usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems. […] “A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors. […] Oh, they depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they’ve done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it’s too late to make corrections.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

I see a real correlation with INLEO onboarding Dash and I see Dash community being very active on HIVE. @thedessertlinux has been a wonderful supporter of HIVE. We could see 7K accounts out of a project with 400K Twitter followers. We saw both $HIVE and $DASH price going up and have major news coverage. I compare these results with the cost. As long as nothing illegal is done, transparency is redundant at the face of results. As long as I can trust a project to not do anything illegal, all I care is results; not receipts.

I was also blown away by the results of the Dash integration. It is unfair to cast a shadow on that and the benefits it has brought Hive while the marketing campaigns were going and to some degree nowadays (but we know retention is a bitch on all social media platforms). I agree, that if results are provided, proofs are a joy killer. But at the same time, I understand those who want to see where money is going, whenever possible. In some cases, it might not be possible to share details, like in the case of exchange listings where you pay to get listed and you might sign a NDA (how much power CEXes used to have, and to some degree, still have!).

Page views for INLEO are down by 8% compared to the previous month. Retention is truly a problem. One of the main things than can help with retention is having more users to engage with. If the users feel like there is nothing to do, they are not going to stick around. Having more users mean there is a higher likelihood of finding people to connect with. Onboarding existing communities at once is a very smart move.

We should also consider that during holidays maybe people had more time to spend online. Some do, at least. I agree that onboarding entire communities is a smart move.

My personal opinion is that retention has a little to do with network effects, a little to do with features, but a lot to do with some usability and bug issues. Once everything is really smooth, I think retention won't be a problem.

Probably it has a little more to do with network effects, when we talk about the masses, but for people already in crypto, I agree, if the others are taken care of, they could choose something from crypto over Web 2 alternatives (or at least at the same time). Thanks for your comment!

Yeah it's the one reason I'm back in the Hive ecosystem. Distriator and v4v are other things I'm keeping my eyes on, but INLEO is the star of the show so far.

IMHO if Hive wants to continue to grow in the new crypto age, it should absolutely double down on INLEO growth.

INLEO is pulling off what @splinterlands did during the previous bull market. I'm wishing to see the games start back with their onboarding and player retention. There is a massive collection of features ready for March and April.

  • Survival Mode
  • Conclave Arcana
  • Land 1.75
  • Validator Nodes

For years I have been saying that games + microblogging is the way to onboard masses to blockchain. They can slowly learn about DEXs, privacy and inner workings of cryptosphere while playing game or interacting with other users on chain.

Splinterlands also has the mobile apps coming and the thing I always forget how it's called with new skins and benefits.

I had almost forgotten about the Skins. They have been talking about Skins for a long time. I have all the Skins for Alpha/Beta Cards.

I have none. 😀 It's one of the major projects slated for Q1. But maybe it will be one of the ones that won't get launched in Q1.

I suspect the same. I don't think it will be a big problem as the first priority is getting more active players and retaining them. Skins will not create enough launch hype without only 7K - 8K players.

INLEO is starting with the Dash blueprint, but eventually getting other coins on board will be nice.

I wish there were more supporters of these integrations will stake HIVE. If we had 6 million more HIVE, we will have the DHF Proposal passed. I'm out of dry powder. I can only let my posting rewards accumulate as HIVE Power.

Yeah, ultimately it's too early for more supporters to have gotten to the point where they understand Hive tokenomics enough to actually buy some and then vote for proposals.

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I am looking forward for the next listing for Hive

There are only a few which would make a difference, probably. Coinbase would probably be one of them, especially for Americans.