A casual Hive users guide to Hivefest...

Check out Day 1

Day 2

While Day 1 felt like a look at those working closer to the central development of layer 1 and layer 2 as well as general user interfaces, Day 2 seemed to focus more on the specific niches and what’s being built on layer 2, the dApps and potential collaborations.

Two of the biggest powerhouse dApps at Hive, LeoFinance and 3speak never fail to deliver but I will get to them later, first I need to mention what may become a new powerhouse at Hive....

A place for visual artists and more

The Most Awesome Talk award goes to @crimsonclad representing NFT Showroom. Her passion for Hive and for art is worn on her sleeve and she does a great job of making it inviting. I’m really happy to have people like her representing our ecosystem.

NFT’s are becoming a huge part of the crypto space, and for those who don’t know, that includes all collectibles, which encompasses art, game related collectibles and potentially a whole lot more. For the visual artists at Hive, it really creates a forum for them to show off their work, and I have a few friends who have been talking a lot about it.

There are two things that stood out about @crimsonslad’s talk. The first is she really emphasizes the diversity of our user base, driving home the idea that the use case of Hive can raise up the art crowd without ignoring the tech and financial end. She doesn’t go much into detail but with the time restrains she does a good job at showing how someone can start as a content creator and then get involved in other aspects of the platform, and find themselves in totally different niches than they imagined. Many who come here start as content creators but then get into development, community building, investing or become a witness.

The second thing I loved hearing was how NFTs has gotten people from the Eth community interested in Hive, and that’s something we could really benefit from. There is no reason for anyone to be part of one community exclusively, so it’s not like we need to compete with ETH but there is probably a lot of room for overlap and cross pollination with many different blockchains, and eth is the most robust of them all when it comes to smart contracts. Very awesome to see, I hope NFT showroom continues to grow and help us onboard new users, as I think it will.

Games

A bunch of game developers presented their projects and there were way more than I thought. I was really impressed to see that gaming startup companies are being launched off on the Hive blockchain, @scrooger’s Slow Sunday Games. Whatever that entails, it means that there are game developers on the chain that intend on building more than just one game, and that if one of their games take off, there will be many other games to get involved with which is attractive to people who come for that.

@tyhran also presents a brand new game called Water Planet, and @rollie1212 discusses some of the overlap that Crypto Brew Master may have with other projects and ideas, and it’d be interesting to see if along with @detlev we can create more of a beer community at Hive.

A hard year for travel

Pinmapple is one of those Hive projects I've been meaning to get into for a while, as I've come across many of it's users, have interacted with one of it's organizers, @livinguktaiwan, a bit and see some potential for collaboration with our Cross Culture Community in the future. I have also tried the Haveyoubeenhere? app and had no idea it was developed by the same person as pinmapple, @martibis. Really nice to learn about him and his story. I think his apps could potentially be another great avenue to find some new users once travel opens up again, and potentially even before then. They have an smartphone app "Haveyoubeenhere?", check it out!

Collaborations and synergy

I learned most of what I know of @lukestokes from his Twitter which is always fun to read, it’s good to know he is always out there representing Hive, getting our name out there and working on a much easier way to send and receive crypto through simple usernames with FIO protocol.

One of my biggest worries is that we tend to be a rather insulated community with little overlap with other projects which makes it hard for us to get the Hive name out there.

That’s why I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Ark has taken an interest in Hive. While a lot of the details of go over my head, I know Ark from my early days of trying to understand the difference between all the many cryptocurrncies out there and Ark always seemed like a real project with a real community that seemed to take a unique approach to smart contracts, So great that @hellomsq showed up.

Our first major breakthrough dApp

2020 was Leo’s year, hands down. They’ve literally built a community with enough excitement and buck behind it that I was, at one point, worried that they’d crush Hive under their weight. I spent a few weeks doubting the intentions of the Leo community because of some really negative things I’ve heard some people say about Hive there, but after observing the overall community, I realized it was just 2 or 3 loud people who didn’t represent all of Leo.

@khaleelkazi is clearly looking for ways to bring up Hive as Leo grows. Leo did so much for the ecosystem this year. They made it possible to sign up for Hive with a Twitter. They helped innovate to show other Hive projects to incentivize holding their tokens. They dove headfirst into decentralized finance which will make it easier for other Hive projects to do so in the future. They created a dEx marketplace and improved upon an already impressive interface.

Most of all, they proved just how successful one of our niche apps could be and gave us a good idea about what works so we can learn from them. They are leading the way and I hope they do a ton of onboarding in 2021.

The Knockout in 2021

I’ve been looking forward to learning about the new 3speak token for a while, and curious to see how they evolve because a video platform that is more censorship resistant and community based is in very high demand right now, and so we have this little window where we can be there at the right time and place. 3speak has the potential to launch us back to $1 Hive and find us a ton of happy and active users.

This was way too much for a short presentation. After watching 3speaks presentation by @starkers and @theycallmedan, my immediate reaction was “uhhhh cool? I think...”. The design complex enough that it probably won’t make sense to some people until they can see it in action. Afterwards I read @theycallmedan's post though and began to see the genius behind their plan. I still don’t fully understand but I see some real genius in this design, these guys are really not half assing it.

Understanding the details won’t be important for the casual user, but for those of us who want to see Hive succeed and want reason to be bullish, you might want to take a moment to read the detailed post linked below.

The main idea is that they will create an IPFS like decentralized storage system, airdrop miner tokens to us as Hive holders and allow us to earn reward/governance tokens through holding miner tokens + helping them host videos. If I am correct, we will be able to help host and earn just by watching videos on the app. The token design is complex but it seems to be built with Hive in mind, putting Hive in high demand.
There are many ways our community can benefit from 3speak right now:

1 The airdrop to all Hive holders encourages us all to buy more Hive and others to get into Hive which will help the price 2 Their tokenomics seem to hive both scarcity of their own tokens AND desirability for Hive in mind 3 Video is one of the most lucrative forms of media and it's begging for some disruption right now, huge user influx incoming 4 This could be news generating which gets the Hive name out there. This is a huge deal because our biggest problem right now is a lack of PR. 5 A better user experience is more fun and comfortable for all of us!

I really hope the 3speak team can slam dunk this, if they do, Hive will undoubtedly return to the top 100 coins and probably much higher in 2021.

For more info on 3speak's plans for IPFS and tokens check out the original article

In Conclusion

I've heard some say that there weren't any jaw-dropping announcements this year, but first of all, I think we did fine without them, just seeing how much is moving behind the scenes and how undervalued we are, and second, I think 3speak really dropped a huge one on us that we haven't really had time to process yet.

I really think the only thing we are lacking now is a proper influx of new users, everything else seems to be in good hands, but hopefully all these different projects can find their own way to onboard so that we are growing on multiple fronts.

I will be doing my best to buy as much Hive as I can and I hope you do the same. I will be delegating to people who are doing good to onboard their friends and keep them there. I have Hive, LOTUS, Leo, WEEDCASH and other tokens to delegate. If you know someone who is doing a kick ass job of onboarding and doesn't have much of an upvote, let me know and I will see what I can do to make it easier to keep their friends here.

Anyways, Great Hivefest. Sorry for my lack of tech knowledge which kept me from understanding some speakers like @archanage very deeply. Hopefully this post was informative and exciting for those like me who try to understand what we can without much tech savvy ness.

We may not have been able to really meet up and all, but we will next year, and until then, I plan on getting back to regular discord parties with my Hive friends and IRL friends. I have two friends who have signed up recently though they have yet to post, both of them signed up after chatting with my Hive friends on discord. :-D Just some food for thought!

Happy Holidays

🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎

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We also have a @crossculture account curating bilingual posts and running contests to support local communities. If you like what we do, please consider delegating to @crossculture or follow our trail 🙂