Open your Hive wallet and two balances look almost identical: HIVE and Hive Power (Staked). Same token, different state and the difference decides most of what your account can actually do. This post explains staking in plain terms: what Hive Power gets you, what it costs you in flexibility and how to move between the two forms without surprises.
HIVE is the liquid form. You can send it, trade it, or move it off the chain in seconds. Hive Power, usually shortened to HP, is the same token staked into the network, "powered up" or "staked" in Hive vocabulary. Staked tokens cannot be spent and unstaking takes weeks, which we will cover honestly below. In exchange, HP is what gives your account weight. Three things scale with it.
Every post and comment on Hive earns from a shared reward pool and votes decide how that pool is divided. The weight of your vote comes from your Hive Power. An account with more HP shifts more of the pool toward the posts it votes on. With a small stake, your upvote is mostly a signal of appreciation. As your HP grows, the same click becomes a real economic decision: you are directing rewards to work you think deserves them.
Hive has no transaction fees. Instead, every action you take, posting, commenting, voting, transferring, consumes a small amount of Resource Credits and those credits recharge automatically over time. Reading costs nothing. Writing costs a little.
Your RC budget is proportional to your Hive Power. This is why brand-new accounts sometimes hit a wall mid-conversation: nothing is broken, a tiny stake just means a tiny budget. Even a modest power up makes that wall disappear for everyday use. And if you run dry before you hold any HP, this is exactly what Boost+ on Ecency is for: it spends Points on a temporary Hive Power delegation to your account, as covered in "Getting More Eyes on Your Posts".
When a post pays out, a share of its reward goes to the people who voted on it. That is curation and it means voting is not just generosity. Your curation earnings scale with the HP behind your vote, so stake compounds in a very literal way: rewards you earn can be powered up, which makes your votes heavier, which increases what good curating earns you next time.
HP also carries governance weight. Votes for Hive witnesses, the operators who keep the network running, count in proportion to stake, so powering up grows your say in how the chain itself is run.
Powering up is simple and takes effect right away. From your wallet on ecency.com, choose Power up on your HIVE balance, enter an amount and sign with whatever you normally sign with: Keychain, HiveSigner, Ecency Keeper, MetaMask with the Hive snap, or your key. There is no minimum commitment ceremony and no lockup contract to read. The stake starts working immediately: heavier votes, bigger RC budget, curation earnings on.
Here is the part some guides mumble through. The exit is deliberately slow. When you start a power down, your HP converts back to liquid HIVE in 13 equal weekly parts and the first part arrives one week after you begin. Getting the full amount out takes 13 weeks. You can stop a power down at any time and the unstaked remainder simply stays as HP, but you cannot skip the schedule.
Why would a network do this? Because everything HP grants, reward influence, governance weight, is supposed to belong to people with a commitment to the place, not to whoever borrowed capital for an afternoon. The slow exit is what makes the stake meaningful. It has a personal upside too: staked funds cannot leave your account in one transaction, which buys you reaction time if your keys are ever compromised.
The honest practical rule: only power up what you are comfortable committing for a season. Keeping some HIVE liquid for flexibility while staking the rest is a normal, sensible split, not a lack of faith.
You can also lend influence without spending it. Delegating HP to another account gives that account the resource credits, vote weight and curation earnings of your stake, while the tokens remain yours. The recipient cannot power your delegation down and you can take it back. It is how Boost+ works under the hood and how established users routinely help newcomers get moving.
Less than you might fear. Enough HP to post, comment and vote daily is a small amount and the early gap is exactly what tools like Boost+ exist to bridge. From there, the steady path is unglamorous: write, curate and power up a slice of what you earn. Stake on Hive is not a paywall. It is participation, made visible and compounding.
Check both balances at ecency.com, power up a little and let the slow compounding start. Your blog, your keys.
