My last post ran a bit long and I still had quite a bit more to say so I guess we're gonna do a part two on the MAGI launch. First off I saw a couple weird things searching for it on Google.
I know they want to make a token and have publicly stated as much, but there appears to already be one on... Solana? That's what I would assume anyway being tradable on Phantom. Of course this is meaningless with a market cap of $1.4k and could easily just be some scammer. Official details for a token might take a while to broadcast considering how they're trying to go about it.
Also not an official thing but the Dash community seems to have taken a slight interest in the Hive ecosystem already. I know they were messing about with LEO as well for a second. It certainly would be interesting to see a DASH/HBD pair on Altera... exciting even.
The interesting thing about MAGI from what I can tell from the docs is that it should be way more scalable than similar networks like Thorchain. On Thorchain you basically need permission to get a listing and it's a lot of work to integrate that into the network (plus increased overhead cost for all the thorchain nodes). It appears that the way MAGI works it should be much easier to get a pairing listed on the network. I'm not even sure if it requires permission to do so. I'll have to look more into that.
bug: the tooltip showing the APR% is not up to date
One of the first things I noticed when logging in to the Altera frontend is that you can stake HBD for yield without it being locked. How is that possible? Well I didn't look it up but I assume what's happening here is that the HBD actually is locked up on chain in the vault, but because these are technically wrapped tokens on a second layer they can still just as easily move about the network unhindered. I would venture a guess that it still takes 3 days to unlock the sHBD into HBD so that it can be transferred back to the main chain. However, it's still a very cool mechanic that also just lends more evidence to the idea that bonding HBD on Hive is not a good idea whatsoever. If anything we should be going the other way and just providing yield to liquid assets that are in a valuable place (IE AMM liquidity pools). Unfortunately this is a topic that requires a full 1000 word post even though it's something I've already blogged about over a dozen times. One might even argue that this mechanic shows just how easily a bonding system can be created to facilitate nested secondary markets... but I'm digressing hard right now and need to stop.
If we search the docs it becomes a little more clear:
Basically if you want to run a MAGI node you're probably going to stake your consensus tokens as collateral to disincentivize bad actors. I'm sure it's very interesting and worth getting more into some other time.
Yesterday I did a couple test operations:
This cost me about 6 resource credits which was more than half of what I had. I'll be honest it was a little annoying considering I have a quarter million Hive power and running out of RCs is just something I don't have to deal with ever. I'm still not 100% sure why RCs on MAGI are based on HBD, but it also makes sense considering HBD is the thing that all assets are paired to. It's an asset that many outsiders won't mind holding because it maintains a much more stable value than any of the other listings.
I'm still not clear if there's any hidden financial incentive here. Does sHBD give RCs as well? Does HBD get quietly powered up and yield given to the MAGI network? Are these RCs just to make sure the nodes don't get overloaded and there is no real financial incentive in play? No idea. Not really a big deal no matter how it's done to be honest.
My guess here is that these HBD RCs exist simply to prevent the network from being DDoSed and exploited in obvious ways. If you want to perform a lot of actions over a short period you'll need more and more HBD to do it.
Gotta say it is pretty cool that you can just move sHBD around without unstaking it. Of course there are no practical applications for this as of yet because there are no sHBD pools and nobody accepts sHBD for goods and services yet. However, it could be very powerful in the future; there's a lot of potential there. I might not think Hive bonds are a good idea but a feature like this easily facilitates the secondary market. Even just being able to satisfy the general population's insatiable desire for instant gratification (instant vs 3 day wait) is a significant feat in my opinion.
When I go into my transactions tab it only tells me which asset I transferred from. The asset I transferred to and where that asset went is obfuscated and you have to dig through the block explorer to find it. Probably the most annoying thing about this experience so far... which I'll take as a good sign that it wasn't something more pressing.
Thus far this experience with the Altera frontend has been pretty clean. The frontend user experience seems very streamlined and should get even better as the network acquires more listings and allows new users to play around with this stuff without even having a Hive account (they will use their native token wallet instead). The most interesting feature so far is the fact that locked HBD earning yield can be moved about the ecosystem freely. I'm excited to see where the network goes from here.
