The Hive blockchain is paying interests again for HBDs you hold, since witnesses raised the interest rate in March 2021. This interest was paid whether your HBDs were fully liquid or in your savings. A situation that particularly benefited the exchanges which received interest thanks to HBD deposited by their customers.
As of June 30, when hardfork 25 was activated, the blockchain stopped paying interest for holding liquid HBD and switched to interest payments only for HBDs stored in savings.
Quickly after that, the witnesses raised the interest rate which is now 10%.
For your information, the interest rate is evaluated by the blockchain on each block production round and is the median value of the rates proposed by the top 20 witnesses + 1 backup witness (you can see these values on my witnesses page).
So even if you see values ranging from 5% to 12%, the value most suggested (by 11 of the top 20 witnesses in each round) is currently 10%. So much for the technical details.
As it has been more than a month since the changes took place, we finally have the necessary hindsight to analyze the changes that this has induced.
The first direct effect of the announcement of that change coming with the HF25 (vertical red bar in the chart) is that many users have decided to move their HBD towards their savings in order to benefit from this generous interest rate.
We went from a stable 8,949 accounts storing HBD in their savings at the start of June to a raising 10,045 accounts on August 2.
At the same time, HBD capitalization stored in savings exploded from 59,713.583 HBD to 859,389.052 HBD! It is clear that some have clearly understood their advantage in doing so.
What this graph tells us is that the number of accounts earning interest has dropped sharply from around 250 per day to now vary between 12 and 38 accounts.
As for the amount of interest paid, the change is difficult to observe as the amounts paid daily are currently small. Let's see this with a little more perspective:
Here we can see the big change, moving from 36,883 HBD interests paid to 7398 accounts in June against 1,696 HBD to 687 accounts in July.
All the interests that were previously paid to the exchanges (and the DHF) holding liquid HBD are now spared. That's approximately 35k HBD per month.
We will see over the next few months whether this opportunity will be seized by more users and whether the numbers presented here will grow.
What is certain is that the combined factors of an attractive interest rate and the efforts of developers and witnesses for HBD to better hold the peg are starting to take effect.
I will continue to monitor it and keep you informed, so stay tuned.
