WOW! - You have mined more than 1500 $WINE in just about 6 weeks since we made the 1st announcement and introduced $WINE to the Hive community! And we haven't even started our collaborations with tribes & communities on Hive yet. Big things are in the making! Hello Hivers & !WINE lovers,

thanks for all your incredible engagement and for sharing a glass of !wine with your beeloved Hivers, Newbees and strangers you like to toast with. You truly made our soft launch a success and helped spreading the word all across Hive - and $WINE into the wallets of more than 1500 users so far. And this is only the beginning. This is HUGE!!

The next big step forward will be the launch of the WINE Token sale, the 1st ICO carried out on Hive. The Initial Coin Offering - or rather Initial Token Offering - is divided into 3 rounds with 10 intermediate rounds each which incentivizes early participation & guarantees the best price for each of the rounds. To make it as fair as possible & give smaller Hive accounts a chance to take a bite there'll be a maximum cap of total WINE to be purchased per account - which is 5000 WINE.

Read more about it in the upcoming posts explaining the ICO & the WINE project as a whole.

so make sure to stay up to date & follow the official @wine-token account!

READY?!?

.. only 7 more days to go!: the WINE ICO starts in 7 days on Feb., 20th 2021 @ 12am UTC

For those of you who might wonder "what da heck is $WINE?" we have a short sum-up for you:

!! if you are already familiar with how WINE works you can skip that part & continue reading below !!

$WINE is a brand-new fun engagement & rewarding token on Hive & Hive-Engine;
fueled by the best auto-minting algo of its kind which makes the token extremely scarce (.. and valuable - as the markets confirm);
ran by the WINE community which has its own #wine-tavern on the CORE Discord server > join us, say hello & become part of the still young but continuously growing movement!

How does it work?

Invite your Hive friends, your favourite content creators or new acquaintances to a glass of !wine* (or two ;)* **and share $WINE rewards together

earn or buy at least 25 WINE, stake it* **& reply to a new post or comment with a comment !wine

the @wine.bot serves you both a glass of WINE (0.1 WINE each) as soon as it heard your call & after checking if you still have free drinks left on your coaster for today

you can call the @wine.bot once (1x) per day** to serve you if you have 25 WINE staked

if you want to *order more WINE from @wine.bot for free to share it with another Hiver simply stake 75 WINE (1st call 0.1 WINE each, 2nd call 0.2 WINE each)
for 3, 4 or 5 daily WINE orders from @wine.bot, stake 225, 675 or 2025 WINE and you share 0.3, 0.4 - up to 0.5 of WINE rewards with the post/comment author per day & successful call - depending on the number of WINE you have already ordered that day *(1st call 0.1 WINE each, 2nd 0.2 WINE and so on - up to 0.5 WINE each for the 5th call)

in total you can earn up to 1.5 WINE per day only through curating for the WINE community + the all the WINE rewards you earn through your posts & comments if others invite you to a glass of !wine - or they tip you straight away*

read more about it in depth in the WINE introductory post and *follow the official @wine-token account to not miss the release of the !wine paper v0.1 where we visualize the concept with graphics

join our #wine-tavern channel on Discord & get involved if you want to help Hive to thrive - or simply wanna know more about WINE & what else we have in the pipeline for you :)

So the WINE 1-2-3 in short:

**find a good post (or comment)!
- post !wine* *
- push post
- earn $WINE (+ extra $HIVE *)
**share $WINE rewards 50/50 with the author

repeat! ;) - until the @wine.bot says you have enough for today :D*

**requires minimum of 25 WINE staked curated posts receive extra upvotes if our voting lead & its trail have enough Mana left

the more you push other members of the WINE community the higher your chances are to get bigger upvotes yourself - one hand washes the other; every vote counts, every HIVE more is a valuable one :)

by using the #wine or #imagenius hashtag you increase your chances to get upvotes from our voting leads @imagenius, @imagenius.too or the @wine-token & its voting trail

FYI: we're leasing more & more HP for the @imagenius & @imagenius.too accounts which work in your favor - if you publish good &/ fun content, join our Discord & get accepted on the WINE whitelist | so far the @imagenius account has slightly over 18K HP, @imagenius.too sits on around 14 500 HP recently & the @wine-token and its small but growing voting trail is charged with 15 000+ Hive Power. We'd welcome if you help filling the open HP leases for @imagenius & @imagenius.too on Dlease or consider directly delegating to @wine-token. We're working on an automated reward delegation script which will be implemented shortly after the ICO has been launched. If you delegate now you'll receive an extra bonus in $WINE :)

Power to the minnows & more $WINE for the people! :)

we're gonna publish a post dedicated to community growth, collaborations, delegations and how to earn a decent active/passive income with WINE during the upcoming days

**Please join the voting trail using hive.vote by clicking here! Thank you!! requires HiveSigner

.. and now back to the updates you were all waiting for ..

The free "MINE WINE" campaign soon comes to an end!

Once again the **TEAM !WINE wants to thank you all for making the $WINE token soft launch such a HUGE success! We're looking forward to the WINE ICO - which is about to start on Feb., 20th! More info tba soon. So follow the official @wine-token account to not miss out on the best prices of the first real Initial Coin Offering on Hive with dynamic offering rounds with price guarantee, automated refunds, instant transactions & notifications - .. without slippage!

more about it - you guessed it - in the next post! :)*

Originally our free "MINE WINE" campaign was intended to run only for a few days during the Christmas celebration. But since you took it so well & engaged heavily with !WINE & the @wine.bot we didn't just want to shut it down from one day to the other. So we extended it over New Year's - and still - you couldn't get enough to mine & share more $WINE :D

The active user base grew incredibly and quickly got into the hundreds thanks to your efforts. It was hard to keep track & pace with you. Unfortunately our project initiator, @roger.remix got unexpectedly sick for quite a while - which also has been the reason why you haven't read any updates if you weren't in the Discord. In the meantime we were busy behind the curtains. Since we announced WINE the server grew by more than 50% to a whopping 150. Props!

We highly recommend you to join the server! Not only to get the latest updates, but also because you'll get extra HIVE upvotes once you're whitelisted, there's a #wine-post-promo to support one another & get more $WINE rewards, we have exclusive bounties & giveaways - and yeah, it's fun hanging out in the #wine-tavern. Soon the use cases will grow way beyond that, so stay tuned! 8)

Due to all that we've decided to *extend the free "MINE WINE" promotion until the ICO will be launched. Indeed like with all the things which seem "too good to be true" we were soon facing the difficulties which come along with Hive & incentivizing people for their content..

Hive makes it easy for scammers & bad actors!?

Yes at the 1st sight, a big NO! on the 2nd :)

a comment farm bot network tried to use !wine to mine as much $wine as possible during a short period of time, draining the Resource Credits (RC) of the @wine.distributor which is in charge of issuing and distributing newly minted $WINE and endangering the whole campaign

But like everything on a public chain it leaves traces which can easily be traced back. So better watch your (drinking) habits! ;) Thanks to the detective work made by @roger.remix, the assistance of @wesphilbin and the owl eyes of @hivewatchers this issue could be fixed within a blink of an eye. The scammer has been sent to a rehab and we make sure to chase him away whenever he decides to rig the system for his own advantage. We continue having an eye on his army of sock accounts.

The @wine.bot didn't serve us $WINE!?! What happened?

We took the bot down over the last weekend to add security features & update its functionality.

Here's why & what we did..

We decided to make it less lucrative for potential scammers who are mainly driven by their greed and don't care about the hundreds of hours & thousands of HIVE we've spent to add value to Hive and make it a better place we all enjoy. Our aim is to build something valuable & sustainable on top of Hive which serves you and improves your overall experience and maximize your fun & income. Since *$WINE is constantly being traded at 0.60 HIVE and above (recently between 1.30 & 5.98 [ICO start price: 0.27, launch price: 0.60 HIVE]) we don't want him/her to benefit on your expenses. So we took the @wine.bot offline for less than 24h, consulted what's the best thing to do to move forward without letting this killjoy win and "punishing" hundreds of others at the same time. We came to the conclusion that it can't stop us, but only make us stronger in our mission - provide value to the Hive ecosystem!

So we've implemented & updated the @hivewatchers blacklist, combined it with our own and finished working on a global API to make it more efficient & less resource consuming. Apart from that we are already working on tools to track suspicious behaviors, map bot networks and trigger alerts & send automated notifications.

More infos about how we help making Hive a place where human interactions count the most in one of our upcoming posts (after the ones of the ICO)!

The most important thing for you to know is that *the @wine.bot is up & running again and waits to serve you some more !wine. You just need to call him over :) Go & try it out! ;)

A little downside may be that we reduced the maximum !WINE calls per day from 3 to 1. Like that the transition to the new script will be easier, the token value is relatively higher, potential misuse can be spotted earlier and harm can be prevented. So in the end we all win and the scammer helped us to battle-test WINE before it goes fully live. Thank you very much! :)

Our buy walls are already waiting for his little dumps - and then (s)he's out once and for all.

btw.. we urge you to wait for the ICO launch instead of buying WINE from the markets! The recent $WINE support level is at 1.30 HIVE while the Pre-ICO launch price is as little as 0.27 HIVE ;) It shows us that your interest in $WINE is high and that the scarce tokenomic model did it's job well; but please don't pay more than you need (& spend more than you can afford :)

Why haven't I seen updates regarding $WINE although I followed @wine-token?

Since our 'editor-in-chief' @roger.remix had to take some weeks off to fully recover & our main dev @ali-h has been busy with his studies we decided that it's the best to postpone the initially planned ICO launch mid of January to give you enough time to digest all the updates we have waiting for you. We hope you have some spare time left!? :D @theguruasia helped a lot to keep track of the process & to test the code. That increased the WINE quality even further as we were adding tons of necessary and "great-to-have" features before the launch which we'll present you in the upcoming posts. Like that we want to give you the possibility to fully understand the project & dive deeper into WINE, its motto & ethics before we launch the ICO. Therefore the upcoming publications are crucial if you want learn more about the idea, the WINE tokenomics and what role it plays in future developments on Hive.

That means that we might "flood" you with information during the next days & weeks. But believe us, that's all for the better. Soon you'll *become a real WINE pro - and you're gonna like what we have waiting for you!

We used the time well to not only **create an ICO script for Hive, but also an easy-to-use interface which will make participating into an ICO easier & more secure than anything you have ever heard of. Hive is soooo much better than Ethereum to do all this. Do you agree?

.. once again the Reminder: Make sure to follow @wine-token to stay in the loop!* It's worth it!!

.. better late than never; so in case you haven't heard the call - it's ..

(stock photo provided by @lightcaptured - thanks for it! Go & follow him if you haven't! :)

This photo was meant to be included in the New Year's post, but we hope it's not too late to wish you a good start into 2021! ^^ All good things take their time ;)

What's next?

**The long awaited WINE (Pre-)ICO announcement

the release of the !wine paper v0.1

some interesting WINE stats about usage & project growth

announcing the long overdue $WINE giveaway winners who helped sharing the word

our TESTO TROOPERS will finally get their WINE rewards** for testing the very first version of $WINE with the help of our $TESTO token. *Thanks again @ecoinstant, @pixresteemer & @wesphilbin! Let us know if you are interested in testing the ICO script too!?

Insights in the project roadmap

surprise, surprise, surprise* :P

Cheers all,

your TEAM !WINE

Teaser: the 1st ICO on Hive! // Important updates on $WINE