As the title says, what are you delegating your HP/RC to and why?
There's many usecases to Hive Power, the most known ones are curating to earn curation rewards, some self-voting here and there (but not too much 馃憖) and then we also have delegations which are quite popular on our Delegated Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. Even though delegations don't add towards governance votes and the inflation interest currently at around 3% APR stay with the account that holds Hive Power, not the delegate.
One thing I've said many times in the past is the feature to be able to invest into projects through delegations that I think is quite underrated in the space. Although I see some activity of it happening on Ethereum through DeFi but we've had it here for years and there's been some good usage coming from it. For instance, instead of buying certain tokens/nft's from a project directly, you can instead delegate hivepower to them. This enables them to use said influence to curate their community for instance, people posting about the project, commenting, etc, and if ever the time comes where you feel your delegation isn't used properly or the team isn't making the progress you wish it would be doing, you can always revoke it trustlessly without having "spent" any capital, just interest of what your delegation would've amassed in curation returns.
Then we also have curation projects, I for instance run one as well through @ocd and the account @ocdb that offers liquid returns on people's delegations. This is for some that are either too passive to make use of their daily votes themselves, or think that with our focus and initiatives their stake is in better use there to potentially grow the network, distribute the stake properly to strengthen it and make sure the value of the ecosystem and their delegations grow over time with a team that focuses on that. They can verify that they are getting returns from their delegations on a daily basis through Hive payouts minus a small fee and if that were to stop occurring for one reason or another they can revoke them and at max lose out on a week's worth of returns. Quite minimal risks compared to some projects out there that ask for your BTC or ETH directly for you to never see them again most of the time.
Since we're talking about @ocdb, although I'm sure many others function similarly but that's the one I can speak of at least, there's also use to RC's these days and you're able to delegate them out just as easily as you can delegate out stake. Currently there's more RC delegations to @ocdb than Hive Power, this means that people who do actively use their hive power themselves don't see much use of the RC's that come with it. Instead of claiming account credit's for instance which is one of the main things you can do with it these days if you have a considerable amount of RC, you can delegate that out to let other projects claim them if you think they're using them in better ways to help the network which in turn helps your stake.
With ocdb we have been assisting hiveonboard.com to generate free Hive accounts for interested users. The thing with hiveonboard is that it has measures in place to prevent people from farming/squatting Hive accounts which they seem to like to do for some reason. It asks interested people to perform an SMS verification before they can proceed to create their Hive account which has seem to fend off most abusers but it's not completely bullet proof. For now we think this has been the best usecase for our account credits but we're always looking to see if there's more things we can do with them.
Another thing to note here is that, aside from regular curation returns to @ocdb delegators, we also send them whatever rewards may come in from the likes of beneficiaries that hiveonboard places onto new accounts. These may occur if the new users have used a referral link to be invited to Hive which usually places a 3% beneficiary on their posts to be sent to the referrer, 1% to the account creditor (@ocdb) and 1% to the service (@hiveonboard) that made the account creation possible in a trustless way (without anyone else ever receiving/seeing the keys aside from the creator). Bear in mind that the new accounts can remove these beneficiaries at any time but since they're depended on rewards they earn it's a nice bonus to those who made the free account possible and those who referred the user to the platform, which of course they wouldn't have earned any rewards had they not found out about Hive.
So while those who delegate RC to @ocdb may not get anything out of it per se, in terms of returns, they can delegate a little HP at the same time to also receive some extra returns from beneficiaries of new accounts if they get curated and have them in place. We're constantly looking for more ways to reward our delegators because we appreciate the trust they have in us and that they empower the curation that we do which is most of the time cast manually and vetted by a lot of eyes with a lot of experience in curation and abuse checking behind them.
Okay, this post got a bit more self-promotion-y that I anticipated it to become. I personally also delegate to some other projects, one of them being @poshtoken in exchange for newly printed POSH which gets distributed half to delegators and half to sharers. Another project I am currently delegating a lot to is @wrestorgonline as I like what they're building and the potential it may have in the future, although let's hope you didn't read this far down cause I'm enjoying the Woo returns from my delegation so far and more delegations to the account would mean less WOO for me. :p
What are you delegating to and why?
Bonus question: What do you think of delegations in general?
