Personal Progress Update @ Q4 2024 - Another Record Growth And Hive Power Crossed 6,000!

Happy New Year!

It's time for another quarterly stocktake of my blogging adventures on Hive. Cool thumbnail, isn't it? It's done by the talented @mightpossibly!

As a quick introduction, I made my first post on 29 Sep 2021 and it was an introductory post about my Splinterlands journey. Since then, it has been around 3 years and I have been actively posting and curating on Hive. Time flies indeed!

And I just want to say how grateful I am to be making friends within this community and receiving so much support, be it in the form of upvotes, comments, or even sharing of new knowledge.

So here's what I have been busy with over the past 3 months:

• Splinterlands: I have continued with my Splinterlands-related postings, including the weekly challenges! Feel free to check them out under my posts if you are in need of card and SPS delegations!
• World Map Pin: As planned, I have done quite a number of travel posts under Worldmappin (used to be Pinmapple) and it was really nice to see that they were very well liked! This included my trips to Japan, Maldives and Indonesia! Also had a lot of fun with the #winterchallenge!
• Weekend Experiences: This was something I discovered in Q2 2022 during my random browsing of the Hive posts, and has now become one of my weekend posts. I really enjoyed challenging myself to come up with something interesting to share for the weekly prompts and I enjoyed reading other sharings within the community to. Finally, the curation committee are very generous with all the rewards when they see writers putting in effort to write a good post!
• Introvert Talks: I also started a new personal series called Introvert Talks, which was meant to be a new initiative or theme, where I myself as an introvert, just talk about reflections and thoughts about my life, or maybe share more personal stuff.
• HoloZing: Late 2023 also saw the introduction of one of the upcoming games on Hive, called HoloZing. I have written a few posts on this, and if time permits, I would try to write more about it! Hehe!
• Neon Strike: This is another up and coming game, which is currently in alpha phase. I have played it for quite a while, and I have also been sharing my thoughts and progress in the game too!

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Here's my top 3 posts for this quarter. Last time, most of the top 3 posts, if not all, would be Splinterlands-related. For the first time, the top 3 posts for the quarter are actually travel-related posts on World Map Pin! Big shoutout to the World Map Pin team and thanks again to everyone who has showed your support by upvoting my posts.

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Now onto the financial aspects of my blogging experience, here's what I have accumulated so far as of 1 Jan 2025 (at time of writing).

Hive Wallet

Wow, what an exceptional quarter of organic growth! Totally didn't expect these numbers.

In terms of numbers, compared to the previous quarter, I have accumulated a record 1148 more HP and 184 more HBD in my Hive Wallet!!! Prior to this quarter, the highest HP that I have earned was 774 HP in 2024 Q3. Other than that, it was always hovering about 500 HP per quarter. I think there could be many reasons for this.

• One is getting more votes for my posts, which is partly due to the luck and partly due to my effort. During this lull season, many people have given out and the ones that are still around continue to reap the benefits.
• Two, as the base grows bigger, my curation rewards also grow in tandem. I continue to manually curate on a daily basis whenever I can.
• Third, I have also traded/converted some Layer 2 tokens into Hive this quarter and this contributed an additional 137 Hive, which was a record as well.
• Finally, the base HP also increases at about 3% yield and having a bigger base means a bigger gain too!

While the accumulation of HBD was supposed to slow due to the "Coffee Fund" (see below), this quarter has seen a massive jump as well. This is largely due to the curation rewards, as well as some trading "profits" in periods where Hive prices are volatile. Even though HBD interest has decreased to 15%, which would have affected the HBD accumulation as well, the numbers these quarter were still very strong.

All in all, my Hive Wallet has increased from USD 2,444 in the last quarter to USD 3,970 currently. In terms of USD, this is at a record high as well because the price of Hive has rebounded from last quarter. It is always heartening to see that my account has continued to grow (or sometimes, I call it "snowball") in terms of Hive and HBD, thanks to passive returns, be it from delegation of HP, delegation of RC, or just the 3% APR for Hive and 15% APR for HBD. That said, nothing has changed for me, it's still business as usual.

P.S. For those who are very sharp, you would notice the Hive and HBD values don't tally with my Hive Wallet. That's because there are some adjustments made to account for some separate projects which I am involved in. With the adjustments, it then makes a meaningful apple to apple comparison across quarters.

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Coffee Fund

In 2022, I decided to formalise this process as my personal funding for my Coffee Fund! As to why it's called the Coffee Fund, it's because I am going to use the money to buy myself coffee while I write my posts or think of writing ideas at the cafe. Hehe!

For background, this was what I formalised:

The topic of profit-taking has been in my mind to reward myself and I have been spending some thought on how to do it in a sustainable way, as I still want to be heavily involved in the Hive community. So after exploring various options, I have decided to withdraw only my HBD interest as "profits" on a quarterly basis. Since HBD is going at 20% APR, it would be around 5% of my HBD each quarter.

But wait... HBD APR is currently at 15% now (since 2024 Q3 in fact)! As mentioned last quarter, I pondered for some time if I should maintain 20% APR (5% of HBD per quarter) or reduce accordingly to peg to the prevailing 15% APR, which would then translate to 3.75% of HBD per quarter. Looking at my overall account and the rate of growth, I think I am able to maintain status quo and the 5% shortfall (between 20% and 15%) in HBD APR vs profit-taking can be easily made up by other activities on Hive. From a computational perspective, it's also easier (5% vs 3.75%) and won't be affected by the fluctuations in the APR going forward.

As such, for this quarter, it worked out to be 80 HBD. That brings the total for 2024 so far to 282 HBD! Seems like this system is working fine, with a good balance of sustainability and reward.

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Hive Engine Wallet
*only included tokens with substantial values, i.e. above 10 USD (instead of top 5)

Have included a column this time to provide a description of the tokens so that it helps me keep track of my involvement in various projects.

Like I have mentioned before, unlike Hive and HBD, tribe tokens in the Hive Engine Wallet are more susceptible to massive price swings and have poorer liquidity, so these USD values are just for reference (i.e. likely lesser if I would to divest all at one go). This is also why I have separated the totals between the Hive Wallet and Hive Engine Wallet.

As mentioned above, I have continued to divest some Layer 2 tokens, and convert them to Hive. There are two main reasons to this. The first reason is because I realise most of the Hive Engine are seeing a decline in value (in terms of Hive). The second reason is converting to Hive not only helps to preserve some value (from the price decline), it also boosts my vote power and allows me to vote on good posts regardless of the tribe tags.

That said, I have also been accumulating some tokens which I think have the potential to do well too! For this quarter, I have bought THGAMING on a net basis, and these are funded from HBD.

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So that's all I have!

As always, thanks for reading and have a pleasant day ahead! See you in the 2025 Q1 update!