Week through Adrian's Lenses (6-12 July 2024)

(edited)

This is the #79th 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

  • Splinterlands
  • Distriator
  • Inleo
  • Ghana Borehole
  • Hive Rally Car
  • Hive on X
  • AIOHA
  • Witnesses
  • AI & Hive-Engine
  • Exode
  • Holozing
  • Spanish posts
  • OffChain Luxembourg

Crypto

  • Germany, BTC
  • BTC, ETH - Commodities

Week on Hive

15 of 26 tracked posts made it to this week's issue of the "Week on Hive" roundup.

In the Spotlight

The Future of Vouchers in Splinterlands to be Determined after SPS DAO Votes

To be honest, I wasn't quite sure what to include in the spotlight of this week's Hive news roundup.

This is a topic I already covered this week on my blog, but in the meantime I discovered an important update this morning, to which I haven't had time to listen to, but I want to link it here.

Why is this topic important for Splinterlands and maybe at large for Hive, since Splinterlands is such a big piece of the ecosystem?

Vouchers represent one of the tokens of Splinterlands, a later addition, during a period of massive growth of the game. They were supposed to be scarce and offer some bonuses to their holders in presales or in other punctual situations.

They turned out to be difficult to manage (work needs to be done to include them with every sale or burn event), they are not scarce like in the beginning, and they are another hurdle for newcomers.

Two draft proposals have been created to deal with vouchers, which have opposite approaches.

The first one proposes the removal of vouchers and its use cases, with all existing in-game vouchers being converted to DEC-B. Hive-Engine vouchers would be converted to DEC-B when moved in-game.

The second one is a counter-proposal which proposes the alternative that the voucher inflation should remain as part of the existing reward package for SPS stakers and node validator holders, but its utility be reduced to purchases from a Voucher Shop (the proposal says items in the Glint Shop that should exclusively be purchasable with vouchers).

In the meantime, @yabapmatt, the CEO of Splinterlands, who contributed to the first proposal, has been invited to the show of The People's Guild, who have been behind the counter-proposal. I discovered the recording of their show this morning and haven't had time to listen to it, and the summary doesn't help much with what was discussed, so I want to listen to the conversation myself. If you are interested in the topic and have around 2 hours to spare, you might want to do that too...

Whatever proposal is chosen, it's one thing we need to remember: as long as people have opinions and debate regarding what is happening with the game, it means they care. When there will be apathy is when we should be worried... Splinterlands is not in any danger for that to happen yet.

Marketing / Awareness / Branding

Distriator: Reward System to Incentivize Usage and Adoption

Distriator is tweaking its reward system. It incentivizes repeated and regular claims (based on spending of HBD or Lightning sats in physical shops), but also onboarders of businesses (called "trusted guides") in the Distriator network earn commissions, as well as onboarders of people who claim rewards.

Additional rewards are set aside for leaderboards.

Inleo Taps into the Tap2Earn Movement

Inleo attempts to attract participants from the tap2earn movement on Telegram, with a series of tasks crafted especially for them. Let's see how many of the millions of tap2earn-ears will be interested. This seems right up their alley! Or maybe I'm wrong, I haven't been caught in this movement...

An interesting note here, @leo.voter is the top account creator in 2024 with 6.6k accounts created so far, as we learn from this post. What this post can't say is what are the retention levels (almost a general issue on Hive, with a few exceptions).

Media Coverage on the Hive-Funded Borehole

The launch of the 15th Hive-funded borehole in Ghana was covered by local media as described in this post.

Hive Rally Car at WRC Acropolis Rally

The rally car funded by ValuePlan (and others) entered in the WRC Acropolis Rally from Greece.

HiveBlockchain Account Active on X

This handle has been secured for Hive by @eddiespino a few months ago, if I remember well. While not the official Hive account on X, it links back to all official accounts of Hive on centralized social media (@hiveblocks), and content started to be pushed on @hiveblockchain (on X) by @hivecreators. Here are more details.

Governance / Development / Dapps

AIOHA Made Available React Libraries

AIOHA (All-in-One Hive Authentication), which is being worked on by @techcoderx with feedback from the VSC team, now provides its first framework-specific libraries for React, both for backend and for UI. Next will follow JSON-RPC API, Custom login providers, DID methods, other frameworks (Vue and Angular were mentioned).

Gandalf Witness Update

@gtg created a witness update post, where he suggested fellow Hive witnesses to upgrade to the latest minor HiveD version (1.27.6) and API node operators are strongly advised to use the HAF version instead.

There is also a security checklist for regular users at the end.

Coding a Simple Hive-Engine Trading Bot... Using AI

@raymondspeaks showed us in a video how can AI be used to code a basic Hive-Engine trading bot. I haven't followed the steps to see if it works, but seems like a starting point for those interested. From my experience, you need some sort of programming background to be able to write the best prompts and then judge the correctness of the AI's responses - if it does what you asked it to do or not.

Games

Exode Introduces Card Rentals and Starts Sale for Shares in a Space Station

Card rentals are tied to the new space station, so it's it's not something open across the board.

Shareholders in the new space station have tiered benefits, based on their holdings. Here are all the details.

Overview of Holozing Healers

After a pretty long absence of communications regarding Holozing explained by @acidyo's health issues, he is back with a post that dives deep into healers, mostly a refresher.

Meetings / Events / Communities

Hive Hispanic Index is Growing

What @demotruk calls Hive Hispanic Index represents the posts which have the 'spanish' tag. And he noticed it's been on the rise lately, and there is a new ATH on percentual basis, compared to total Hive posts. We can infer that their retention is higher, but also that they are more consistent writers during periods of low Hive price than authors from other parts of the world.

OffChain Luxembourg: Decentralized, but MiCA-Compliant?

I introduced the new on/off-chain organization OffChain Luxembourg founded by @sorin.cristescu last week. Their aim is to remain as decentralized as possible as an organization, within the limits and constraints of the existing laws and regulations. Because the non-profit organization they founded needed to have a hierarchical schema, they have a top-down hierarchy. Because they wanted to be MiCA-compliant, other constraints followed. You can read about them in one of their posts.

They will be offering the first MiCA-compliant token in Luxembourg, which is the OCLT token on Hive-Engine. They also want to branch out, and had set up a meeting in Bucharest, on 18 July. The announcement is in Romanian, so the presentations will likely be in the same language.

Week in the Crypto World

German BTC Sales Almost Over

We've all witnessed the sale of 50k BTC by the German government recently, which looks like is almost over. This bitcoin was in fact in the possession of only one German State, Saxony, which got it after seizing the holdings of a film pirating website. I read somewhere, that the German government (or in this case the Saxony State) is forced to sell anything it seizes in a limited amount of time. They may have reached that time limit, thus the precipitated sales. That shows that laws and regulations will never be flexible enough to take advantage of a potential better outcome, but also start from the assumption that "people are bad" and try to take advantage of weaknesses in these laws.

Court Says That Bitcoin and Ethereum Are Commodities

An Illinois court decision from last week states that both Bitcoin and Ethereum are commodities. Another episode in the inter-agencies war for influence and jurisdiction in the US.


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Posted Using InLeo Alpha

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7 comments

The voucher problem needs to be fixed, and I am actually in support of just removing them entirely, instead of giving them less use. As for the Hive rally car, I wonder if this has brought more to Hive than its cost. Rally races are a bit niche, and I don't know if it is popular enough to get more eyes on Hive.

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(edited)

As for the Hive rally car, I wonder if this has brought more to Hive than its cost. Rally races are a bit niche, and I don't know if it is popular enough to get more eyes on Hive.

To joke about it... Having a car in Formula 1 is too expensive.

Seriously, I don't know. Would you say cycling is more popular than rally racing? We sponsor a pro cyclist and a motorcyclist in Venezuela too. Much cheaper too, I imagine. But I don't know if we can compare the exposure. Tour de France, yeah! But to have a cheap team there is much more expensive than the rally car. It's just the matter if we believe this segment of the population looks at sponsors or not, and if yes, to ingrain a message in their heads, create awareness and start a brand.

What would be better would be put a QR code on the car (it might be one), but which doesn't lead to hive.io but to something like hive.io?via=rally.car

This way we can have some KPI of people directly interested in the website to take the picture of the QR code. It's true, that if they see the hive.io link on the car, they can also type it in. Those can be temporarily linked to some extent, during or shortly after the races.

0.00000927 BEE

I didn't know about the other sponsorships, but I agree that those seem cheaper. I wonder if it would be better to just pay for advertisements on websites than to spend money on these.

0E-8 BEE
(edited)

The Hive rally car and the vibe contest seems to take more than it brings, and that's why it would be better if they were only one-time, or probably once in a while. Even investing that money in a tap to earn scheme would bring more eyes to hive..

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Wow that's a lot of events and progress from Hive. I love seeing Hive represented globally. Rally car to borehole. This is truly awesome brother

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Yep, it's a way to make Hive... popular. Hopefully.

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!HUG !LUV

0E-8 BEE

Leo has a good initiative for tap2earn and I think it's not too late. If they hadn't written a previous proposal, I'd have said they should write a proposal for the DHF and make this tap to earn initiative a big one that can onboard users to Hive

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(edited)

If that works, they can push as much of the funding they get from the DHF proposal into this as needed. They said in the past they haven't spent much of the funding received and are waiting for better opportunities to spend higher amounts on and for some projects and collaborations to start showing results.

0E-8 BEE

It looks like quite a bit happened. I wonder what people will decide for VOUCHERS. Either way, I can't really affect things on that end. I don't think I heard about the court case saying that they are commodities. I guess the legal fights over crypto continue.

0.00113649 BEE

Yep, from the draft proposals votes, looks like it's going to be tight, but I'm sure some votes will swing.

About the court decision on BTC and ETH being commodities, I discovered the article late when I was about to wrap up my post. I'm sure the fight isn't over yet.

0E-8 BEE

Hive car really?
Does it mean that Hive has a competition of cars or how?

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No, it means Hive has sponsored a rally car and the team that goes with it to participate in certain World Rally Championship races. It happened last year too. It isn't the first race of the year they participated in. But in Portugal, the gearbox (I believe, if I remember well) broke and it needed fixing.

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The Ghana borehole was awesome
Ghanaians have done so many things through Hive
Kudos to them!

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Yeah, they certainly seem to know what they are doing over there.

0E-8 BEE

I also don't want to buy a car and drive around my city to advertise this platform.

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You don't want or want to?

Either way, yes, the rally car is expensive. By looking at the sponsors on the car, as far as I could see, ValuePlan (i.e. Hive) is not the only sponsor.

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