Do You Still?

I was thinking about something the other day...

..do you still bother managing your Hive Engine tokens?!

Every so often, I will log into Hive Engine and stake or manage the tokens that I've got. Unfortunately most of them are not worth much these days.. but I still do it for the sake of it. I remember when the tokens first came out! PAL being the first, really, then a few others like Leo and on down the line. Those were pretty exciting days when I look back at it!

Being on the chain here for a while, I remember all of the old promises and one of the funniest ones that gets OCCASIONALLY floated around these days, was the mythical SMT!

What are SMT's you say? They are Smart Media Tokens, essentially the Ethereum layer-2 stuff where you can just spin things up and then send them out, except they would be on the base-layer of Hive if I remember correctly, not a Layer-2 like Hive Engine. It was all the hype, but sadly was never delivered and still has not been delivered. I don't know of the discussions around it these days, but I think it's for sure best that it never got implemented.

I think these days, we should recognize and appreciate that we should reserve Layer-1 for core functions that maintain the chain itself and send these types of things to Layer-2, which the Hive Engine team has done and some others I think are building upon that for other things. This is for sure the most logical and sensible thing to do, rather than the original direction of SMT.

If we had implemented SMT, what would happen to the price of Hive overall if a bunch of shit-tokens were thrown at it, causing lots of traffic for really not a lot of benefit. Just look at the historical charts for some of the assets on Hive Engine now. Not to hate against the big ones like Leo, but they are not nearly where they were a few years ago, and are bleeding constantly. Doing that on the base layer to me sounds like it would for sure cause more friction and chaos, so I'm glad we didn't go that route due to technical factors we couldn't get beyond. A blessing in disguise for sure!

I've been lucky in that yes I've for sure spent quite a bit of my Hive assets on the Hive Engine tokens, but at the same time I've also gotten a pretty good amount of return on investment from some smart decisions. For example, my best choices to this day were selling the first bunch of distributions of Splinterlands SPS, netting me a healthy 5k Hive Power! After that, I sold all of my Genesis League Goal soccer token, gaining me another 3k Hive Power I believe.

I've invested in a bunch of the assets on there as well though, spending likely several thousand Hive and HBD on various things like BRO and a few others that I can't recall off the top of my head at the moment. It's all about giving some and taking some, it's just finding the right balance that makes all the difference. Some say I could be a bit of a fool focusing on the base-layer token like Hive, but for me, focusing more on Hive gives me much more of an opportunity to take some off the top here and the invest it elsewhere which I think is an important mindset to have. I don't have tens of thousands of Hive to be throwing around at every opportunity like some people seem to (although, they likely won't show you how much in debt they are in the physical world.. lol) but I manage a healthy little balance!

I mention this as I am going over to Hive Engine for the first time since the beginning of the summer to do some staking of the various things I've got!

What about you, how often, if ever, do you go over to Hive Engine to stake your assets? Let me know in the comments!