Most of the daily inflation of Hive is distributed to Hive users, in the form of Author and Curator rewards. In theory this 65% of daily inflation is distributed like this, in an equal split between authors and curators, but reality sometimes has a way of defying theory.
This post is intended as a retrospective analysis on how much the Hive network has "spent" rewarding authors and curators since the split from Steem in March 2020.
Author rewards are split between liquid and staked author rewards. In general you receive half your rewards as HBD and half as Hive Power, but sometimes the HBD is replaced with liquid Hive when the HBD debt limit has been exceeded. In practice, more value is distributed in the staked rewards, most of the time, but there have been times when HBD has been overpriced and users are getting substantially more value in HBD rewards.
The chart below shows the daily value in USD distributed as author rewards, divided into Liquid Hive, HBD and Hive Power. It seems we typically spend about $10,000 per day on author rewards even in a bear market, but at the lowest points of the prior bear market it was about $3000 a day. At the heights, we have seen amounts approaching $70,000 awarded to authors per day.
Curator rewards are paid fully in staked Hive, aka Hive Power. The chart below shows the daily value of Hive Power allocated to curators per day.
It should amount to about the same as author rewards overall, but in practice it is usually more. Hive typically allocates about $10,000 in curation rewards per day, but with past lows of less than $3000 and highs of almost $75,000 per day.
In total, we are spending about $20,000 a day on authors and curators, but is it evenly split between the two?
Here are two more charts, the first showing all author and curator rewards combined, and the second showing the relative distribution of author vs curator rewards per day. I changed the colour scheme in the latter when I noticed the opportunity to create a national flag out of it.
As we can see, as long as HBD price is properly pegged, the 50:50 split does hold pretty well, although not perfectly all the time.
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