Week through Adrian's Lenses (31 August - 6 September 2024)

in #adrians-lenses3 months ago

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This is the #87th 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

  • HiveFest
  • Hive Rally Car
  • INLEO
  • Stolen Credentials & Fraud
  • Keychain
  • BeeD
  • Block Explorer
  • Hivehound
  • PWR
  • Slumpy Market
  • Splinterlands
  • Holozing
  • SPS DAO
  • dCity
  • Rising Star

Crypto

  • Polygon
  • Bitcoin L2s

Week on Hive

13 of 30 tracked posts made it to this week's issue of the "Week on Hive" roundup.

In the Spotlight

HiveFest 2024 Is Next Week!

HiveFest starts next week on Tuesday, September 10th, in Split, Croatia, and officially lasts until Sunday, September 15th.

Traditionally, the first day is reserved for people checking in and being welcomed, and with a light schedule, since most of them come after long flights or road trips and are tired.

The next two days, Wednesday and Thursday, will be reserved for conferences and networking, usually with some evening schedule, and the last two-three days have a more touristic focus, where participants that remain after the conferences enjoy some local attractions and more networking and fun.

While the first HiveFest I "caught" on-chain was in 2018 in Kraków, Poland (so without the first two), since then I believe in-person HiveFests (not the 2 ones via VR) generally respected this format of daily schedule, but of course each of them had their own flavor, and participants often remember what was special about them.

This HiveFest in Split promises to be one to remember as well, both thinking about some of the speakers and the progresses and plans they will hopefully announce with their projects, and the non-conference part. Being an European location, we might see a higher participation too, even in this slumpy market.

Looking forward to next week and HiveFest 9! By the way, next year will be the 10th consecutive year of holding this event! Well, two of them were via VR "thanks to" our dear politicians.

If you're going, don't forget to get your HiveBuzz badge and your Splinterlands in-game epic title on sight.

Marketing / Awareness / Branding

Hive Rally Car in Acropolis Race in Athens

In the last update, the team was getting ready to start the shakedown and the ceremonial start the next day. The Hive Rally Car will also be present at Hivefest next week.

Governance / Development / Dapps / Education

INLEO: Improvements to the Referral System and In-House LeoAds System Coming Soon

I wrote yesterday a full blog post about the existing and changes to the referral system planned for Inleo for this week. I'm not going to rehash the same information again here, but I do find it important. Note that when I started writing this report the Inleo platform wasn't accessible (probable issues with a rollout), but I'm sure they will be fixed by the time I finish and publish this. Of course, I couldn't wait since it takes me a long time to write these reports, and here's where the power of Hive with its multiple front ends shows once again. If one is temporarily disabled, you can always use an alternative and go on with your work. Could you have done the same on Facebook, when they had a few hours of blackout in recent history? Nope!

One other thing Khal talked about in this week's Inleo AMA was Inleo's In-House LeoAds System. If you don't know what that is, it's a full-fledged internal advertising platform like all big platforms have, instead of relying on 3rd party ad managers and providers. This system that Inleo has built has a dashboard for the advertisers from where they can start campaigns, select preferred ad placements and manage their campaign, including budget. Khal also mentioned, they will start with very low pricing for ad spaces, and increase them gradually (perhaps through auction) as more advertisers become interested.

On the other side, they want to try something revolutionary, to make ad approval system decentralized, via a 24h poll, LEO stake-weighted. It is a risky approach, but we will see where this goes.

The big takeaway from this is "wen". I may have heard wrong and I won't listen through the AMA again to convince myself, but I think I heard him say they are planning on releasing this by September 15th, which is... in about a week and a half? I hope I haven't heard wrong. If this is true, I didn't think they are so close to releasing this part, since they pushed in different directions recently, from shorts to referral system, from LeoAI to now LeoAds.

Unrelated, in his Chain Chatter mostly weekly show, Khal had an interesting guest, as he often does.

About Credentials Theft and Arbitrage Fraud on Hive

@guiltyparties published a questionnaire for potential victims of credential theft and arbitrage fraud on Hive. This is a good way to create awareness, although I don't know how many of the victims would like to respond to the questionnaire publicly.

Keychain Mobile v.2.3

The new version (Antroid and iOS), added the option to automatically stake HE tokens previously introduced for browser extensions, plus the feature to receive funds via QR code, explained in the announcement.

New Stablecoin on Hive-Engine: BeeD

In an announcement in discord after the smart contract of BeeD had been deployed, Aggroed described it as the stable coin of Hive-Engine, much like DEC is for Splinterlands.

I however learned about it from @achim03, who saw it on the TribalDex interface before anything was mentioned in discord. Here's his post.

Development Updates for Hive Block Explorer UI

@mcfarhat and a few others he onboarded for this purpose (different than the Actifit team), have been working on the Hive Block Explorer UI, which was developed in the back-end by the Blocktrades team. In his post, @mcfarhat describes what they worked on recently.

Hivehound: An Old App Revived

As we discovered from this post of @solominer, he tried to get coders to revive an old app for years. Until he got to @sagarkothari88 and his team, he wasn't successful. Sagar and his team apparently built it in 48 hours, we find out from Solo's post. As his title says, this app is a post aggregator with filters. Considering content discovery is awful on Hive, filters can be a great help.

PWR Dividends to Start in a Few Days

@empoderat let us know that dividends on PWR (only those in LP) will start on September 11th. Paid half in SWAP.HIVE and half in PWR, with a confirmed APR of 20%. Here are the details.

Slumpy Market "Let's Be More Cautious" Discussions

I guess this can be a section of its own during these times in the crypto market, which to be honest, feels like have been dragging on forever, but we may be quite close to the end of the tunnel. The problem is the first one that exits the tunnel is bitcoin and for altcoins it may still be a while.

In this context, people on Hive are asking questions, coming up with potential solutions and debating what to do if this keeps going.

Last week was a pretty intense focus on authors and their rewards. I linked some posts in last week report in that sense.

This week, we come back to the DHF proposals and... conversions.

@blanchy has been trying to put together numbers send and received by various projects from Value Plan for a good while. He may be kind of sarcastic sometimes, but that doesn't mean some of the information he puts head to head isn't at least an inquiring approach that is worth attention, particularly since some elements do seem outrageous, absent clarifications from the ones mentioned. This is his latest report, part 1.

In a conversation about conversions, we learn how much HIVE needs to be minted at these prices to keep HBD at peg. The discussions on the post are very interesting. @sps.dao will help a bit when it will convert its 825k HIVE it already purchased to HBD, which is a conversion in the other direction to what is predominant these days. Likely, we will need to suck it up on this one. In the uptrend that will eventually come back, the direction of conversions will slowly reverse.

Games

Splinterlands Promo Cards and Voucher Shop

Splinterlands began their series of 10 promo cards in 5 events, with 2 promo cards, one legendary (50k DEC per BCX) and one rare (3k per BCX).

There are also two new abilities introduced, Blasphemy of Uul - Permanently gain +1 ranged power for each allied 0 mana card from the Chaos Legion set, and Cleanse Rearguard - Cleanses the last allied backline unit with a magic debuff.

There is a leaderboard based on which at the end of all promo events will be distributed titles to the first 500 ranked.

And finally, according to a passed proposal, we now have a Voucher Shop. In the Voucher Shop there is a common card to buy at 30 VOUCHERs per BCX. Another card will be introduced in its stead after a while. Here are all the details.

Holozing Updates

Setting a referrer feature is going away! I don't know if it's still there, but if it is, it's your last chance to set a referrer. Going forward referrers will be set only if they join with a referral link.

Also, an email newsletter is coming, and those who will confirm an email address will get a little reward.

The Inventory page will be updated soon, and more soulbound rewards will come based on the amount of contributions of everyone (amount of ZING earned).

We also have another teaser that starter pack purchases are coming soon. Here is the announcement.

SPS DAO Proposals Status

@clayboyn published a situation of the passed SPS DAO proposals and their current status, in progress, on hold, or completed, with additional explanations for each of them.

dCity Student Claims

Last week was announced that students may be claimed by holders of Communal Housing, Luxury Street and Migration Center. This change is now live and the prices of claims in SIM have also been announced.

Also, for newer potential investors in the game, the post describes what SIM Power and what the SIM CLUB are.

Rising Star - New Cards

Rising Star has the habit to introduce new cards at the beginning of every month. This one was no exception. @nupulse shared them.

Week in the Crypto World

Polygon Begins Transition from MATIC to POL

POL will be Polygon's new staking and gas token of Polygon 2.0 (which will turn into aggregator of chains - kind of like Cosmos?), replacing MATIC in these roles. POL will also be slightly inflationary (2% annually), compared to a max supply of 10b and slightly deflationary for MATIC. Some holders of MATIC on Ethereum, centralized exchanges, or hard wallets may need to migrate manually, but there is no deadline so far. Here are more details.

New Bitcoin L2 Offering Bitcoin Liquid Staking (and it's not the only one)

Have you heard of Bitcoin L2 Core? I haven't, until recently. It is a EVM-compatible Bitcoin sidechain that uses both mining and DPOS to secure its network. Basically, they build upon the security of Bitcoin, adding additional functionalities of other chains, from what we see so far, from Ethereum.

LstBTC is a ERC-20 token issued by Core, but backed by native BTC held in a multisig account on Bitcoin L1. Liquid staking rewards are paid as CORE tokens, the native utility and governance token of the Core network.

It's obvious a push to build on top of the Bitcoin network that brings more utility to Bitcoin without needing to move it at the base layer, due to fees. We will likely see more of that. Here's the article with more details.


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My sister says I’m the most sarcastic person she knows but I never think that about myself . Dohhh . 😂😂😂

She might be onto something, lol. I have my moments of sarcasm or irony too.

Thanks for the news! I learned something that I didn't know... ;)

That's great! What would be the reason for a news report, if it had no news in it, lol?

Heheheh... Well, yes... But I think that I'm well-informed, and then I find a bunch of new info in your posts! That's what I meant... hehehe
It's always something that we didn't know... 🙂

I find out new thing in the posts of others too. We can't catch everything, that's for sure.

The HBD and conversions topic is interesting. I don't quite agree with others blaming the stabilizer when the total conversions of regular accounts more than double the stabilizer's conversions. If we want users to convert their Hive to HBD, shouldn't we increase the HBD APR?

when the total conversions of regular accounts more than double the stabilizer's conversions

Where have you seen that? From dalz's chart, which is only for accounts with conversions above 1000 dollars, that's true. But I don't see how including the smaller ones could tip the scale so dramatically.

If we want users to convert their Hive to HBD, shouldn't we increase the HBD APR?

I heard it's been considered, but to be honest, it's not like that. There are four categories of people using the HBD to HIVE conversions, other than the stabilizer:

  • people or projects who receive HBD regularly (from the DHF, usually) and want to optimize the amount of HIVE they receive at this time of the market (for Hive, it would be preferable if they used the internal market, but it's their decision)
  • speculators
  • big HBD holders who might have an issue with the APR dropping and want out (I haven't seen any of those in dalz's chart that I could recognize as doing it for this reason)
  • small users who don't know what they are doing anyway and confuse swapping with converting

If the logic for increasing the HBD interest would be to convince people to keep HBD in savings rather than convert it to HIVE, I believe it won't work at this point. The incentive is higher to do the reverse and wait on the volatile coin, rather than stay on the stable one, at any (reasonable) interest. The problem is how is being done, in my opinion. This is not a time for personal optimizations at the detriment of the blockchain.

Where have you seen that?

From the same post/report:

image.png

The first image showed 4M conversions. If the stabilizer had 1.1M conversions, I assumed the 2.9M was from regular users. Do correct me if I'm wrong with my assumption.

As for the increase of the HBD APR, if it won't be enough to encourage people to convert their Hive back to HBD, at least it can make them think twice before converting the HBD to Hive. You have stopped your goal of stacking HBD right? I have been converting my author rewards HBD to Hive as well, and even more so after the APR was lowered to 15 percent.

The first image shows only HBD -> HIVE conversions, and only above 1000 dollars. The image you reference is for total conversions, including HIVE -> HBD.

You have stopped your goal of stacking HBD right?

My reasoning for stopping the HBD weekly challenge wasn't the drop in APR. I ran out of HBD reserves and would have needed to sell HIVE to HBD to keep up with increasing amounts of HBD needed weekly. It didn't make sense logically, at this point in the market.

Instead, I now BUY Hive with HBD from author rewards, which is not the same as converting HBD to HIVE. Buying HIVE doesn't create more HIVE and helps support the price (well, I'm not a big buyer, but everything counts), while converting HBD to HIVE burns HBD and mints new HIVE, inflating its supply.

I see. That makes sense. Thanks.

The image you reference is for total conversions, including HIVE -> HBD.

Wait are you sure? The title of the graph says "Net Hive Created by Category". I don't see why Dalz would include HIVE to HBD conversions there.

Yes, I am sure. When he says conversions without specifying anything else, he means all of them.

I see. Thanks for the clarification.

This is the first news without an update from Hive Ghana😅

Not really. And they keep working on their borehole project, but I thought it doesn't make sense to update on it every week.

Thanks for the mention!

You're welcome, man! I found out about a few things on Hive from your recent two or three posts, so it made sense to link one in here.

Quite interesting talk about the peg, I just saw today that the hbdstats.com shows the marketcap wrongly and also the debt ratio too. I then discovered this is hardcoded.. that Hive considers the debt in its marketcap calculation and is why we have a huge $35m difference with coingecko/hivexplorer .. so we dont have a 30% debt ratio, but a 45% one!

I'm not sure how you got to these conclusions, but a few screenshots should clear things up:

From hbsstats.com:

image.png

From hiveexplorer:

image.png

From CoinGecko (market cap of HBD, a little below peg at 95c):

image.png

If debt ratio would be 30%, HBD would not be printed anymore, so it would be evident right away.

P.S.: I figured out what you mean. The HBD in DHF is not calculated as debt because there is no risk of being converted into HIVE immediately, but only in time, as DHF payments occur. At least that's the explanation I have.

Yes, it's the formula used to calculate the debt ratio counts the hbd debt as part of equity! This is why Dalz has $35m extra market cap than coin gecko.

https://ecency.com/hbdstats/@dalz/hbd-stats-now-with-a-backend-and-auto-updating-charts#@mypathtofire/re-dalz-sjec2m

Ok... I get what you mean now. I agree, using virtual supply instead of HIVE's supply is the wrong way to calculate it. I'm guessing this is a too sensible change to the economic part of the Hive's code and I'm also guessing virtual supply is used in many parts of the code, so it's not easy to change it and then test it and make sure things don't break. It's not something you wanna break (more than it is, I mean). At least we know the debt ratio is a little underestimated by the blockchain code, but to be fair, initially there were proposals to set the haircut at 50% from 10% and the more conservative 30% was chosen. Good that you brought it up. It looks you weren't the only one.

yes, when the HBD supply was smaller, the impact was less noticeable, but now it has grown. The main thing is that you cant call the Hive virtual supply = Hive Marketcap, as that is not what it is.

The main thing is that you cant call the Hive virtual supply = Hive Marketcap, as that is not what it is.

That's true. If we want to be fair, the debt ratio is something we calculate at internal level of the blockchain as a safety measure. It doesn't really need to meet any external definition or to apply to Hive market cap, unless it becomes detrimental to the safety of the chain. It can be misleading using virtual supply instead of Hive supply, but it isn't necessarily unsafe (it can become at a certain point, though).

I agree and think there are 2 topics here. The ratios and calculations used by Hive Blockchain and then real world definitions of debt level and market cap. You would never include debt in market cap or in a debt ratio.. that is just ridiculous.

In reality, Hive has a dynamic debt ratio due to the way it's calculated (whether that is good or bad and needed is another conversation).

You can't just say, this is what I believe a debt ratio is and this is the calculation! A debt ratio and market cap are clearly defined calculations, you can't claim your own 😆

For digital assets you may say it's fully diluted market cap, but as HBD is DEBT, you can't even call it that. It is what it is.

Regarding Hive using this dynamic formula, rather than a fixed debt level ratio has huge consequences which many are not aware but seems the core Devs know very well, Hive will fully collapse defending the peg the same as Terra Luna. They need to reduce the debt ratio back to the previous dynamic "10%" ratio at least or put the real 30% ratio thst isnt dynamic!

I agree they are two different topics and they shouldn't be mixed because it creates a lot of confusion.

When the haircut level was increased to 30%, I remember it was mentioned it was an experiment, and if at any point we discover it doesn't work out, we will change that limit. Whether back to 10% or something else is debatable. Right now, I don't think we are at risk, we are just at or close to the low-end of the spectrum and we tend to see everything in red. Things will get better in the uptrend. It is true, we will likely reach that haircut level at some point, if not this cycle, the next one. But that happened even more than once in the same cycle when the haircut was at 10%.

You may not remember how it was with a 10% haircut rule. Having the HBD rewards (SBD back then) cut quite often because the haircut limit was reached generated long and heated discussions, particularly because authors didn't like they didn't receive their liquid rewards as well.

Man a lot happened the past week. There is so much going on and it's interesting to hear about the changes in LeoFinance. I agree with the wen part and I wonder if we will get a part of the ad revenue when it does go live.

I wonder if we will get a part of the ad revenue when it does go live.

I believe this plan hasn't changed, so yes. Although it may take a while until first payments. Advertisers won't flock onto the platform, at least at first. We may be doing some advertising ourselves for a while, those who want extra-exposure.