What is the value of Hive? This is a question many of us ask ourselves almost daily. Unfortunately, there is no real, tangible answer to that question because Hive is not a company. Hive itself is not a tangible asset.
For example, Elon Musk recently paid $44B for Twitter. He now owns the company. How did he do it? He counted every share outstanding in the company, had his accountants and lawyers go through all the numbers (assets, liabilities, revenues, sales, etc.), extrapolated that all out, and came up with a number he thought it was worth. He made an offer, the board approved the sale, and voila, he now owns Twitter.
But you couldn't do that with Hive. There is no company. There are no "shares". There's no sales. No revenues. Nothing. Everything that goes into it is basically unpaid labor. Sure there is some compensation through the DHF, but in reality, most of the work done on Hive is done for "free". There are no tangible liabilities or assets. It's all just part of a network with a community that participates in the distribution and maintenance of that network. Without the community, there is no Hive. Without Hive, there is no community. It's a symbiotic relationship where both organisms give value to the other and both are dependent upon the other to survive.
So what is that worth? You could try to quantify it to a certain degree by using "market capitalization". There are currently approximately 371M Hive tokens in existence. Multiply that by the current price and the market cap is around $164M. But for that to be a real number, someone would have to be willing to pay that number to buy the company, which doesn't exist. So is that a real valuation? Probably not.
Another way would be to try and put a value on the number of users actively using the platform. That is something left out of the Twitter example above. But again, there it can be quantified by doing the math on advertising revenues generated per active user. This was obviously something that got calculated into the price for Twitter. But Hive doesn't have any advertising revenues. It doesn't sell anything. It doesn't make anything. All it really does is facilitate interaction between the members of it's community and allow them to distribute it's tokens to things they value, tangible or not.
And there it is. THAT is the true "value" of Hive. It is not a hard asset so much as it's an idea. That idea is a ledger whereby a community can build and grow and interact, and Hive will facilitate those interactions and keep score in the background, making sure that all of those interactions are recorded as fair, unchangeable, and secure.
So what is that worth? Well, that all depends on how many people want it. Simple supply and demand. The more people who "demand" access to this community, the more the limited "supply" is worth. A house in a nice neighborhood in Florida costs more than the identical house in a small town in Nebraska because more people would rather live in Florida than in the middle of Nebraska. Supply and demand. Right now demand dictates that the Hive token is worth 45 cents.
The thing about Hive though, is that the qualities that make it valuable continue to grow. I kind of think about it like an empty house, or better yet, an empty city. There is all this infrastructure that is being put in place--houses, buildings, roads, parks, power plants, water & sewage, fire & police departments, etc.--all it needs is the people to use them. There are city planners already working on continuing to add functionality to these services, while others are coming in and building new subdivisions and movie theaters and arcades and, and, and...
Hive City. A place people can come to blog, thread, bank, trade, chat, learn, network, watch videos, play games, pretty much anything but eat and drink. Right now I believe Hive is a large metropolis with a very small population living inside of it. Most of the services available are underutilized by its population simply because the numbers aren't there. But I believe that is changing.
Some of the "services" available in Hive City are beginning to connect themselves to the rest of the world. It started with Splinterlands becoming the number one blockchain game by transactions and will continue with LeoThreads beginning to match Twitter with it's "threading" app. There is also PodPing and the V4V app that connect the worlds of podcasting and Bitcoin to Hive. #3Spk will connect video, #CineTV connects movies and TV, #Actifit connects exercise, #PsyberX connects FPS gaming, and the list just keeps growing. LeoFinance connects defi with Polygon and Binance and all of these are connected by Hive-Engine and it's wallet and market. It's becoming a very robust city. All it needs is the people.
This is where the Network Effect comes in. How long will it take to fill this city with people? That's an interesting question. The fastest way is to trigger the Network Effect and reach critical mass.
Network Effect is defined by Investopedia as:
...a phenomenon whereby increased numbers of people or participants improve the value of a good or service. The internet is an example of the network effect. Initially, there were few users on the internet since it was of little value to anyone outside of the military and some research scientists.
However, as more users gained access to the internet, they produced more content, information, and services. The development and improvement of websites attracted more users to connect and do business with each other. As the internet experienced increases in traffic, it offered more value, leading to a network effect.
This is what Hive City is trying to achieve. Triggering the network effect would begin to fill the city with people, who would in turn make the city more valuable, thus inducing more people to join the city. It is a virtuous circle where the more people come, the more people want to come. It reminds me a going to parties in high school. Once you let a few key people know there was a party, more and more people heard about it until everyone wanted to go to this party.
That's where Hive City is now. There are a few of us here and we're having a party. The key is to get the word out to a few more people and let the network effect do its thing. But we are responsible for getting that word out. If we want people to join us, we need to let them know what is going to be available at this party. We need to make them want to come. We all already know how good it is. We just need to bring more people in to experience it for themselves. Once that happens, the sky becomes the limit. More people bring more value to the network which in turn make more people want to join.
So it's our job to fill this city. As the network gives us more tools, we need to use those tools to reach out into the world and show people what they're missing. As we know, fear and greed make the world go around. We need to appeal to their greed by showing them what's available and what it could be worth, and tap into their fear by letting them see what they're potentially missing out on. FOMO.
(I've now got "We Built This City" by Starship running through my head. A song, incidentally, that has been ranked as the worst song of all time by multiple publications. lol )
We're not that far away. In fact, here is a list of the amount of time it took a few companies to achieve a million users.
We're already almost three years in so we're not going to be setting any records, but this just shows you have fast it can happen. And as the technology has increased and the world has become more interconnected, these time-frames can continue to shorten. It won't happen overnight, but it happened in less than a week for ChatGPT. lol Of course, the company behind the tech was actually founded in 2015 so while it only took five days from release, it took almost eight years to get it there. The advantage Hive has is that a lot of the infrastructure is now in place. We just need to bring in the people to experience it for themselves.
So, as the new UI for #LeoThreads gets released, and as #3Spk and multiple games begin to hit the airwaves, be active and share what we've got here. Use the tools available to onboard a few friends. You never know when that one friend connects to another friend who connects to a company who figures out a way to use it for their employees....the network effect.
It starts with us, the residents of Hive City.
Hive is the Way
(The images were created by dagger212. The Twitter image is obviously taken from Twitter)
