Week through Adrian's Lenses (7-13 December 2024)

This is the #101st 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
• Reddit
• SpendHBD
• Ezabay
• 3Speak
• CTT
• Communities
• VIMM
• Drama
• Bot Farm
• Blockchain Game Awards
• Holozing
• Soulkeep

Crypto

• Microsoft / Bitcoin
• Stablecoins

Week on Hive

11 of 24 tracked posts made it to this week's issue of the "Week on Hive" roundup.

In the Spotlight

Splinterlands Launched Its Ambassador Program This Week

One of the 6 major projects Splinterlands has on the agenda until the end of Q1 next year has been rolled out this week, during the last scheduled update of the year, and that's the Ambassador Program. A few other updates have been released at the same time, like a new card in the Voucher Shop, 2 new promo cards, and the fact now the splinterlands.com domain (without "next") works on the new tech. The "next" subdomain remains active to not break links that may have been saved using it.

Regarding the Ambassador Program, that will likely be much more lucrative than the previous referral system for big influencers.

It is interesting to note on the leaderboard of ambassadors already 3 major projects that don't promote Splinterlands heavily, but rather as a page people may run into if they explore their interface. I'm talking about Keychain and PeakD on Hive, and DappRadar from outside the ecosystem. Of course, we are talking about a few players brought in this way so far since Tuesday, the leader of the board having 4 referrals so far. So nothing spectacular yet. But I think it will be a major marketing tool for which the team doesn't have to do any amount of additional work.

Want to know what the program entails? Here it is:

Not a Splinterlands... user? Maybe it's time to try it out. Note that both of us receive some credits if you like it and buy a spellbook...

Another thing... One doesn't have to play Splinterlands in order to benefit of these ambassador rewards. But that's more for the Gold tier, than Silver. In this category you can imagine some high-traffic websites or tools (like the ones I mentioned above). Owning such a website and advertising Splinterlands there, even if you don't play, could earn you interesting rewards. Of course, it depends on the type of audience you have, because you need some spenders, otherwise you won't get to Gold tier.

Marketing / Awareness / Branding

Hive on Reddit

@crimsonclad wrote a nice piece about Hive on Reddit in the CryptoCurrency subreddit. There is also some HIVE to be earned by Redditors who have/create Hive accounts. Thanks @rzc24nft-bbg for writing about it and putting it on my radar for this Hive news post.

Cool Rollup Banner Designed For a New SpendHBD Outdoor Campaign

@fokusnow shows some real marketing skills and initiative which could be very important for the success of SpendHBD in Aba, Nigeria. He is introducing a SpendHBD Outdoor Campaign, which will help promote payments with HBD at the businesses listed to accept it, by rotation. Someone from their local ShoKiN team will be on the spot to help and teach anyone interested.

He also designed a very nice rollup banner, in my opinion, which he paid for himself. Of course, we need to acknowledge the role of SpendHBD in the equation for finding an interesting incentive model, and especially Hive for providing the reward pool that makes anything like this possible.

Ezabay Exchange Just Launched

I joined this new exchange that basically revolves around Hive to check it out. If you're concerned about filling in your full name, then do what I did. Use initial(s). Or a fake one. Whatever. As long as you don't plan to use it as an on/off ramp, in which case, your real full name is probably needed.

Right now, the exchange can be used as an on/off ramp to Naira, with other fiat currencies on the way. From previous announcements, we are talking about Ghanaian national currency, and some in Latin America.

Other than on/off ramp, we can also send or receive HIVE or HBD to other Hive accounts, swap fiat (i.e. Naira) to and from HBD and HIVE, or see the real-time price info of major crypto.

One can also create a new paid Hive account using either HIVE or Naira, but they are quite expensive (4.5 HIVE). Of course, it's a business, and if they don't have account creation tokens or use a free/cheaper 3rd party to create accounts, they actually have to pay 3 HIVE to create a new account.

They also have SpendHBD integrated inside Ezabay. That's not a link to the website, but instead it is displayed on Ezabay. I believe that will bring a lot more visibility to SpendHBD, provided the exchange becomes popular.

The chances are it will become popular. Just think about it... Even before other fiat currencies are added, someone could add Naira to Ezabay, swap it to HBD, spend it in a shop via SpendHBD, get cashback from... Hive, turn it to Naira or keep it as HBD and continue doing the same.

Governance / Development / Dapps / Education

3Speak Is Back...

... we are announced in discord, including uploading videos. Encoder might be slower for now while it catches up and also, the announcement mentions that issues may resurface because of their unreliable IPFS cluster, until they migrate everything to SPK Network.

New CTT After Some Time

Matt and Dan and their guests (including Taskmaster, Khal, or Disregardfiat), explored the topic of what will drive the value of Hive in the future, in another CTT show that comes after a long while.

Looking at Hive Communities

@dalz had a look at Hive communities here.

Inleo team has reason to be proud for recent progress... Looks like Dash'es integration was a massive success so far. Leofinance is by far the most active community by number of posts and comments (mostly due to threads), and has 2.6k active members as of November 2024. As Khal noted, these stats are for Leofinance community, not for Inleo as a whole, where content from other communities can be created and interacted with.

VIMM Development Update

VIMM's DHF proposal got funded and they published their first development update.

Some Drama...

Leofinance witness missed blocks for a week which eventually led to some heated exchange of replies. I'd rather not add any links, but they are very visible if you are curious and interested.

Are You Voting For Plagiarized Content?

As you might've noticed, heard or read about, a huge Splinterlands-related bot farm repurposed their bots after not being able to be profitable in Splinterlands anymore, probably. And it's now targeting Hive's reward pool.

Knowing a little bit about this bot farm may prevent you from upvoting stolen content posted on their accounts. I know not many like the source, but hey, we work with what we have...

Games

Play2Earn Blockchain Game Awards 2024 - 3 Games on Hive Participating!

Play2Earn Blockchain Game Awards 2024 is set to award winners in 18 categories. Three games on Hive participate, Splinterlands and Rising Star in the Best Card Game and Best Browser Game categories, and Crypto Shots in the Best Shooter Game category. Would be nice to vote for them!

Unfortunately, Hive hasn't been included in the ecosystems to vote for.

ZING Distribution Changes

In a last minute post I didn't have the chance to read yet, we are announced that ZING distribution changes and a new creature is revealed.

SoulKeep About Bots and Multi-Accounts

SoulKeep team is analyzing how to proceed regarding bots and multi-accounts, we've been announced in discord. They say the solutions will be implemented within a week or two.

Week in the Crypto World

Microsoft Shareholders Voted Against Adopting the Bitcoin Strategy

I'm not surprised, to be honest. I am surprised by how little support this strategy had among the shareholders: only 0.55%. I'm curious if other big corporations (Amazon?) will come with a different mindset, or bitcoin adoption will hit other obstacles.

The Battle for Dominance in the Stablecoin Market

Tether with USDT is far ahead of any competitor in this market. But in recent developments, Binance decided to back Circle & Coinbase's USDC and promote it on their platform (since they don't really have a well-adopted stablecoin of their own now after being forced to give up on BUSD). Another group formed by Robinhood, Galaxy Digital, Kraken and Paxos rallied around the stablecoin issued by Paxos, USDG. Do you think any of them has any chance against Tether, provided this one doesn't get into any legal or regulation issues? Here are the details.

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