Crypto Is Soaring, Hive is Flatlining
BITCOIN is up 168% since its low in the bear cycle from last year. ETH 147%, RUNE by a staggering 700%. And yet Hive is only up by 45% for it's low of the cycle. And to make it worse even STEEM is up over 80%... There clearly is some (big) frustration behind the lack of a breakout for Hive. We just seem to be staying barely afloat - not drowning, but far from thriving. Last week I pointed out a signal that I have been waiting for almost 2 years. From a TA perspective Hive is all set to climb much higher. We have overcome the weekly trend lines holding us down, but still this doesn't cause price to move. It seems as if something is holding us down.
CMC has us listed at #184. Not good, not bad. When we were at an ATH at over $3 Hive has a MC of over 1B and was in the top 100, briefly. Then like most cryptos we lost over 90% of that value and are zigzagging between 25 and 35 cents. Interestingly we just recently surpassed a circulating supply of over 500M . Volume is still quite good and is probably the major reason why we haven't got delisted from Binance. It's definitely possible that such a move could still be coming and I hope for Hive's sake that we have by then found a way to access BTC's liquidity in the smart contracts soon coming to Hive with @vaultec's upgrades. I understand why it was important to first upgrade the chain and make improvements over the last 3 years, but not having SCs has kept us in the dark, quite literally: who want's to interact with a chain that is stuck in 2016? (again, we have one of the best techs out there, but the lack of this feature makes us seem like a dinosaur in the space).
Interestingly, with $SPS skyrocketing it is only shy of a 5x to surpass Hive in MC! This would make it the first L2 token on Hive to surpass the main chain. It's not going to take long for that to happen if things continue as they are going right now and a 15 cents SPS token seems a lot more reasonable than a $1.5 Hive price. Going to be an interesting moment!
Price isn't the best indicator to measure value
So is our destiny to float adrift and capitulate in several years when we haven't made higher highs while the rest of the market is soaring? Maybe, it's a real possibility. And maybe we just need that sense of urgency to start moving again. It's not like we do not have some interesting things going on atm.
- Smart contracts soon (first test wrapping of BTC on Hive already successful!)
- SPK network (first decentralized media storage)
- Splinterlands (still one of the most active web3 games)
- More Games on the horizon (Soulkeep, Holozing, yet to be announced game with a serious investor)
- A good Stable Coin (HBD)
- DEFI (it's already very active and will get much better with SCs)
- InLeo (one of the best web3 dapp for web2 short form content)
- active blogging platform (how many chains have 10k+ active users blogging?)
- ...
I am sure I missed some good points, but the point is that we have a ridiculously large ecosystem that is actually useful and is being used. Not many chains have that (not even close). We have seen KOINOS exlode over the last few weeks, but all for speculation. There is quite literally nothing on that chain. They have several wallets, an NFT marketspace and a DEX. That is pretty much it. Compare that to Hive. If we'd receive the recognition of what we have here... you get the picture.
Conclusion
Are we in a crisis? I actually think so; not that it is necessarily warranted by all the good stuff we have here and soon to come. But price is a big part of the picture (hard wired into the brain). The recent initiative by @threespeak to come up with a (single) narrative for Hive showed imo that there simply isn't a single one. We have a dozen narratives and while it's hard to market that, it's far superior than just having a single one like most chains do. We are at the forefront of nearly all the innovative ideas in blockchain (social media, storage, stable coins etc.). It's only going to take a spark to set us ablaze (in a good way ;).