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Launched on March 20th, 2020, Hive is a graphene-based blockchain that powers decentralized applications and tokenized communities. Hive is a social blockchain and draws strength from the community that has adopted the various applications and daily use cases of the ecosystem.
Hive Basics
The Basic Idea Behind Hive – What it Is and Aims to Be in The Future
One Account to Rule Them All – How Hive Accounts Work and How to Get One
The Different Currencies On Hive and What to Do With Them (HIVE, HBD, HP)
The Hive Rewards Pool – What it is and How it Works
Communities on Hive and How They Work
Hive Witnesses and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS)
Development Proposal Voting and Decentralized Autonomous Funding (DAF)
Who Uses Hive?
Users
Content Creators
Developers
Investors
Communities
Applications
Applications & Interfaces
PeakD – An All-in-One Interface to the Hive Blockchain
dCity – NFT-Based Simulation Game
Threespeak – Censorship-Resistant Video Platform
Leofinance.io – Crypto & Finance-focused Community Interface
Hive-Engine.com – Layer 2 Tokenization on Hive
Tools & Resources
Hive Keychain Browser Extension
Hive.io – The Homepage of Hive
Hiveblocks.com – Blockchain Explorer
Hivedapps.com – Track the Usage of Hive dApps
Further Listening – LeoFinance Podcast Episodes About Hive
Listen or Watch The Podcast Version of This Guide
Video
Hive Basics
The Basic Idea Behind Hive – What it Is and Aims to Be in The Future
Hive aims to power blockchain-based applications. The primary use case of Hive today is for on-chain social-based activities such as creating blog posts on the blockchain, publising videos, engaging with comments, etc.
In the “Who Uses Hive?” section of this article, we dive a little deeper into the various groups of people who utilize Hive on a daily basis.
Content creation, engagement and the rewards pool drive the majority of daily activities on Hive. One of the primary reasons that Hive has such a die-hard community is because of this social aspect.
Blockchains like Bitcoin provide a sense of community and a sense of awareness that everyone using it is in the fight together. You can see that in the engagements that the Bitcoin community (and similar blockchain communities) have on social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, etc.
The key differentiator of Hive is that this ecosystem bridges the gap between blockchain and social media. The social platforms where users share in their experiences and connect with each other are not happening primarily on platforms like Twitter and YouTube.. They’re happening right here on the Hive blockchain. On interfaces like Peakd.com, 3speak.online, LeoFinance.io and so many more.
Blogging, commenting, vlogging… this is just scratching the surface. There is so much more happening on Hive.
Again, the “Who Uses Hive?” section will have more details on the individuals who use this blockchain on a daily basis, but here is a short-hand list of the top use cases that we see on Hive today:
blogging/vlogging/commenting (content creation)
upvoting and rewards distribution (content curation)
decentralized funding
blockchain-based gaming
community tokenization
value transfer
freelance work
escrow
data storage and distribution
…
To see a ranking list of the top applications and dApps on Hive, check out https://hivedapps.com.
One Account to Rule Them All – How Hive Accounts Work and How to Get One
There are a few unique qualities of Hive accounts that make them user-friendly, agile and feature-rich.
One of the first things that you’ll notice about Hive blockchain accounts is the username. Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum use long strings of numbers and letters to indicate what is called a “public address”. This address is used to send/receive funds and interact with applications on those blockchains.
On Hive, your account is indicated by a unique username that you sent. Much like a Twitter handle (i.e. searching 
For example, you can find our Hive account by looking up 
The second thing you might notice is the ability to seamlessly log-in to your favorite dApps on the Hive blockchain by simply entering in your Hive username in conjunction with the Hive Keychain Browser Extension. Being able to log-in to these apps with just a few clicks is an amazing user experience.
How to Get a Hive Account:
There are several ways to get a Hive account and each comes with its own unique features that make one better than the other for you. For example, if you favor privacy and anonymity, then you can easily create an account in exchange for about $1.00-$3.00 worth of crypto.
If you favor having a free account and prefer a more “traditional” means of verification, then you can forgo the $1.00 to $3.00 fee and instead opt to verify via email or telephone number.
To explore account creation options, visit the official sign-up resource at https://signup.hive.io/.
Out of the options available, my personal favorites are Threespeak ($1), Blocktrades ($1) and Esteem (Free w/ Email Verification). All 3 of these options will get you a Hive account instantaneously.
Signup options via https://signup.hive.io/
Important Note: As with any cryptocurrency, make sure that you follow the instructions closely in regards to acquiring and storing the private keys (and master password) associated with your Hive blockchain account.
The Different Currencies On Hive and What to Do With Them (HIVE, HBD, HP)
So now that you’ve got a Hive blockchain account, you might wonder why there are 3 different cryptocurrencies available on your wallet page.
HIVE (HIVE)
HIVE POWER (HP)
Hive-Backed Dollars (HBD)
Hive blockchain wallet page on the Peakd.com interface
HIVE is the primary currency used in the Hive blockchain ecosystem. Most interactions on the chain will utilize HIVE in one form or another.
HIVE POWER is simply the staked version of HIVE. There is no actual currency called “HIVE POWER”. Instead, the term is used to describe HIVE that is staked in your account which is illiquid and cannot be transferred out of your account unless you initiate a “Power Down” (which would liquidate your HIVE POWER back into HIVE over a period of 13 weeks – 1 payment each week for 13 weeks).
HIVE POWER can be used to upvote content, vote for witnesses, vote for proposals, delegate to other accounts and more. I won’t go too in-depth here as to what you can use HIVE POWER for as there are so many use cases. The best way to explore these options is to simply start using the blockchain and get a feel for how these mechanics work.
The Hive-Backed Dollar (HBD) is a soft-pegged stable-coin for the Hive blockchain. It’s intended to be worth roughly $1 USD and can be used for internal conversions to receive $1 worth of HIVE over a period of 3.5 days.
Again, HIVE and HIVE POWER are what most people on the chain are focused on. The more HIVE POWER you have, the more influence you have on various on-chain mechanisms like the rewards pool, proposal voting, witness voting, resource credits, passive income through delegation leases, etc.
The Hive Rewards Pool – What it is and How it Works
On Hive, there is something called a Rewards Pool. This is a pool of tokens that are derived from inflation on the HIVE token.
The Rewards Pool is used to incentivize content creators and content curators to utilize the social aspect of Hive to create, distribute and dig up great content.
The mechanisms of content discovery are not perfect on Hive, but the system of rewarding content has been iterated several times through previous network upgrades and will likely continue to be upgraded in the future in order to better serve the purposes of rewarding good content.
For the majority of users, all you really need to know about the reward pool is that it exists and that when you give or recieve upvotes on content, the monetary value is coming via a share of the rewards pool. The greater the amount of HIVE POWER there is behind the upvote, the more sizable the portion of rewards distributed from the total pool will be.
For example, if I have 10,000 HIVE POWER and you have 5,000 HIVE POWER and we vote the same piece of content, my vote will distribute 2x as many rewards as your vote will (all other things remaining equal).
There are a lot of other factors that come into play for the rewards pool and I won’t dive into those nitty gritty details here because we’d be talking about them for hours and hours on end. As I said, most users will be perfectly fine on Hive if they simply understand the 2 previous paragraphs.
One day, I’ll do a comprehensive dive into different factors that specifically modify how the rewards pool works and then I’ll link it here.
If you’re curious about the total size of the rewards pool, it is currently (on the day of this writing – April 29th, 2020) 893,583 HIVE or roughly ≈ $521,852 USD.
Screenshot of the real-time value of the rewards fund on the right-hand side of https://hiveblocks.com
The rewards pool is constantly fluctuating based on the price of HIVE and other factors. You can view the total value of the rewards pool at any time by visiting the block explorer (https://hiveblocks.com) and viewing the right-hand side under the title “Rewards Pool”.
Communities on Hive and How They Work
Communities on the Hive blockchain are modeled after Subreddits on the Reddit social media site. You can think of Communities as simply a gathering place for like-minded content creators and users.
The communities feature allows various subsets of users to gather around a similar set of ideals and curate more efficiently than a general moshpit of random content. For example, the LeoFinance community gathers around the core idea of Finance & Cryptocurrency content.
You can view Hive Communities on a variety of different interfaces. Still using LeoFinance as an example, you can view our community at:
Our Website (displays only LeoFinance community content) https://leofinance.io
Peakd – trending/hive-167922
Hive.Blog /trending/hive-167922
As you can see from the URL, community content is organized by a “hive-____” tag. When you use a particular interface, it will give you the option to post into a community which will ultimately help your content get discovered by relevant users.
That is the primary use case of a community – to allow for better content discovery and curation.
So whether you like to talk about art or fishing or finance, you should find the proper community that supports that ideal and then post into that community. That is simply one of the best ways to get noticed and get rewarded on the Hive blockchain as a content creator.
Similarly, if you’re interested in reading about a particular topic, then find the community that writes about that topic and then scroll the community feed for it.
Explore the various communities on the Hive blockchain on Peakd at https://peakd.com/communities
Hive Witnesses and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS)
Hive operates via a consensus mechanism called Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). This is what allows the blockchain to run in a decentralized and community-oriented manner.
As I keep reiterating throughout this article, most users won’t need to dive into too much detail about these topics to gain an understanding of Hive that will allow them to create content and use the dApps.
There are 2 main aspects to Hive DPoS voting that I think every user should understand before using Hive. Voting is weighted based on how much HIVE POWER (Staked HIVE) you have in your account:
Witness Voting
Proposal Voting
The next section will talk proposal voting in more detail. Here, I will mention a few things about witnesses.
Witnesses are elected officials who produce blocks on the Hive blockchain. Each block includes data like content that you publish on your blog or upvotes that you distribute to other people’s content. Whenever you do something on the chain, the witnesses are including your action in an immutable block.
This means that witnesses are essentially the lifeblood of Hive. Without good elected witnesses, the entire chain will fall apart and we would lose the features of immutable and decentralized content storage and block production.
You can vote for witnesses and see the top 20 block producers at https://peakd.com/witnesses
Just like it takes time and research to figure out which politicans you want to vote for in society, it takes effort to get to know these witnesses and figure out which ones you want to support.
Some users take this very seriously and want to have their say in who is an elected top 20 block producer. If that is you, then it’s best to explore these witnesses and vote accordingly. You get 30 total votes, so distribute them to 30 witnesses who you trust to support your personal ideals.
If, however, you fall into the camp of an everyday user who wants to simply use a dApp or create content and not mess with witness voting then I recommend finding a good proxy account to vote for. A proxy account is exactly what it sounds like – you can set your vote to proxy through another user. Whoever that user votes for is who you vote for.
You can set 
To set
There are other proxies out there and I’ll let you decide who to set as your proxy. I definitely recommend getting your say in how this blockchain operates whether you take a hands-on or hands-off approach.
Development Proposal Voting and Decentralized Autonomous Funding (DAF)
Decentralized Proposal Voting is something that I deeply value on the Hive blockchain. If you don’t know the history behind Hive and how it was formed, I definitely recommend reading about it.
The DAF was formed to provide a means for funding developers, communities and applications who provide value to the Hive ecosystem. The twist is that nobody controls the Hive DAF.
Just like witness voting, proposal voting allows every stakeholder to have their say in who gets funded and who doesn’t. If you beleive something is worth funding, then you can vote for it. The weight of your vote depends on how much HIVE POWER you have staked in your account. More stake = more say in what is funded and what isn’t.
How is The DAF Funded?
The DAF itself is fully open-source and transparent. You can view the current balance of the DAF at @steem.dao/transfers.
This account (
A portion of inflation
Donations/Beneficiary rewards from the community
Hive’s Positive Reinforcement Loop
One thing that I love to point out is Hive’s positive reinforcement loop for funding development.
As the HIVE price increases in terms of USD value, so to does the
In an efficient landscape, as development on Hive increases, the price of HIVE should also increase. As the price of HIVE increases, we should see more developers/apps/communities vying for funding.
This positive reinforcement loop can be seen anytime the price of HIVE increases and (hopefully) as new proposals are initiated. It’s a great notch in the fundamentals belt of HIVE as an investment of both time and money.
Next time you see the HIVE price increase by 5, 10 or even 20+ %, take a look at the
Who Uses Hive?
Speaking broadly as someone who’s interested in investing in projects/use cases of cryptocurrencies in the real-world, one of the most important things I pay attention to is how do real people interact with the project, today.
The crypto space (and tech more broadly) can easily get lost in future projections, but it’s always interesting to see what kind of users a project has today, not tomorrow. On Hive, we see a variety of different groups of people using the blockchain each day. This is one of the primary reasons why I invest in Hive and believe that it has a long-term value prop.
Everyone on Hive has their own way of categorizing people who use the Hive blockchain. I have grouped them into 6 main subsets of users and will give a brief overview of what it means to be in each group and how Hive helps the individuals who identify in that group.
It’s also common that a Hive user will fall into several of the groups in different regards. As a new or even existing user of Hive, reading this brief categorization of use cases for Hive may provide you with some clarity as to how Hive can best be leveraged in your life.
Users
“Users” are how I categorize people who use Hive lightly on a day-to-day or even week-to-week basis. These are people who have Hive accounts and read/view Hive content and occasionally comment on them.
On other social media sites, you might call them “lurkers” or people who tend to view from the sidelines with a curious eye.
In my experience, many people start out as a basic user and then expand outward into the other categories as they become more familiar with the blockchain and find ways to leverage it for their personal goals and ideals. I tend to think of this group as being at the beginning stages of the Hive funnel. Slowly making their way onboard.
Content Creators
The title gives this one away. This is a group of users who create content on Hive on a regular basis. There are many people who create content on Hive that has nothing to do with Hive itself.
Yes, there is a lot of content on Hive that deals with Hive, but I suppose that is the nature of being a young project that is still gaining ground.
For all of the posts that are about Hive, there are still so many subsets of communities and creators within those communities that have nothing to do with Hive or even with cryptocurrencies. It’s vital to the platform that more content creators flood the social aspect of Hive with content that can attract your average user of social media.
The beauty of being a content creator on Hive is that it is so much easier to get noticed relative to traditional platforms.
Building on that is the ability to get rewarded. I’ve always liked to think of each piece of content that you put on the Hive blockchain as akin to casting a fishing line.
You’re putting something out into the world and it may get a few bites today or 1 year from now. If it gets a bite within the reward window period, then you may see some great author rewards in the form of HIVE tokens.
Old posts still have value, I often dig up old Hive posts from months and even years ago by googling random questions/subjects and finding a Hive link to it. Some users even write posts today that refer back to something they wrote a year ago. The beauty of blockchain is that we can see exactly who wrote what and when they wrote it.
While your content can only be rewarded for the first 7 days that it’s published, the brand is still everything. On Hive, branding is just as important as it is on traditional social media platforms. The deeper you go with your audience, the greater your awareness and potential rewards. Some believe in that and some don’t.
In my experience, the successful content creators on Hive – we’ll define them as the ones who get the highest levels of comments (engagement) and rewards (upvotes) – are the ones who have built a deep connection with other users/creators/investors/communities on the blockchain.
Some people come to Hive and hear stories of how creators have made thousands of $ on the
