Here I stand recovering from my long winter slumber. This is certainly the longest break I've taken from blogging since I first started writing in 2017. Doesn't feel great to be gone for so long but it's nice to be back. Needless to say 2026 has not been particularly kind to my clan thus far. On top of the crypto winter there's been death and cancer scares and all kinds of drama floating around the periphery. Hopefully I've got the momentum to snap out of it and get to work going forward.
I should have written a post a few days back reiterating what I've heard elsewhere and confirmed personally... MEXC, the last remaining bastion of centralized crypto privacy (or at least just not requiring ID) has fallen. A thousand apologies to anyone who got their money locked up there and is now begging support for a return to sender. I already know one of my crypto buddies is dealing with this drama because I couldn't be bothered to relay the message forward. Annoying to say the least, especially considering they knew damn well exactly how many Americans were using their service through VPN obfuscation.
To be fair it's been very much a "WILL THEY WONT THEY!?!" situation with MEXC for years now. I would log in and they'd tell me my account was engaged in "suspicious behavior" but then keep allowing me to operate without clarifying anything. They even claimed they were going to do KYC over a year ago and just never did it. Clearly the pressure has gotten to them.
If you visit a market aggregator like CoinGecko: the data is frightening to say the least. Hive's top listings are Binance and MEXC. Neither of which are even accessible to Americans anymore. In fact they are NOT accessible to Canada, Russia, China, or the UK as well. So the majority of the "civilized" developed world.
I've never heard of CoinUp.IO, but a cursory search shows a company in the Cayman Islands that apparently can be accessed from USA (with KYC). So I guess that's something! But then there are exchanges like Upbit that are only accessible by a single country (South Korea). Ah if only Hive had gotten a little more involved in the DEX game and we wouldn't be in this situation!
Ah well as luck would have it our prayers may have been answered (barring any kind of devastating hack or exploit). Just yesterday I was tinkering with the MAGI network protocol and was able to withdrawal a tiny amount of Bitcoin into an off-chain wallet. Pretty cool stuff. I suppose I can't pretend to know exactly how it works but it seems to be largely a multi-sig vault entrusted to the trustworthy members of the community (witnesses/devs whathaveyou). Of course the beauty of these types of exchanges is that they can often be used on the short-term without really having to be trusted at all.
In crypto it has always been considered best practice to not leave funds on exchanges. Obviously this doesn't require much explanation. Money in the bank is not your money. It's the bank's money and they simply wrote you a paper IOU that may or may not be honored. That's the simple fact of the matter whether we are talking about Dollars in Bank of America or Bitcoin in Coinbase. It's the same exact concept (admittedly crypto exchanges tend to experience systemic failure and bankruptcy far more often than their FDIC insured counterparts).
Nobody tells people to NEVER use a centralized exchange. The bank still serves a perfectly valid purpose. It's much safer and easier to use an exchange than to try making a trade in person on the street. The main message of caution is to avoid becoming complacent and trusting the bank for extended periods of time just because nothing has gone wrong for a while. Make the trade and exit: that's the main crypto strategy for security that results in the highest success.
Oh I have no idea. The best indicator of such things is how long the protocol has been fighting for its life in the Internet Jungle without getting killed. Theoretically these things are always locked-tight and secure as Fort Knox, but reality often has other plans. However, my main point here is that security of the protocol is only something one has to worry about if they have value permanently parked there. Otherwise the odds of getting screwed over in the 10 minutes it takes to move money around is infinitesimally small.
Ah, you got me! It's basically nothing because the pools are so small. As of writing only $3000 in the HIVE/HBD pool and another $3000 in BTC/HBD. Even my test operation for like $30 had arguably unacceptable slippage. But again this code needs to be audited and tested in the field more before people start yeeting significant amount of tokens into the pool. That being said a protocol like this is exactly what Hive needed, coming into play at seemingly the perfect time (right after essentially another exchange delisting via KYC geoblocking).
As of right now there are only two pairs on the network (Hive/HBD BTC/HBD) but hopefully networks outside of Hive take notice of this and get a listing as well. I heard a rumor that may well be happening, but we'll just have to wait and see. Assuming HBD can get any level of adoption here would be a pretty massive gain to the entire network, and seeing as all pairings are half HBD that means that any amount of significant liquidity is also automatically significant demand for our stable derivative.
One very interesting deviation from the 'competition' in this regard is that similar DEX networks like Thorchain or Maya tend to pair their tokens to a governance token that is not stable. Everything on Thorchain is paired to Rune. Sure, that's great for Thorchain... jacking up the value of their own token, but it's bad for liquidity providers trying to reduce their risk exposure to two ultra-volatile assets at once.
A market maker that puts money into something like an ETH/RUNE pool is going to get absolutely wrecked in the bear market. ETH could crash 90% and RUNE could crash 95% leaving them with basically nothing at the bottom. Meanwhile assets paired to HBD will maintain way more value during drawdowns, assuming the haircut doesn't kick in and HBD's value hovers near $1.
Unfortunately that could be a big ask considering Hive is around a 40% dip away from the haircut being triggered, but at the same time it would not take much demand for our debt to skyrocket the price of Hive back up to a higher level which pretty much solves this entire 30% debt-ratio issue. Also the derivative itself already has a history of breaking the peg, and even in the worst scenarios (crash 99% from $8 to 8 cents) the peg only broke down to 60 cents... which turned out to be more of a free-money buying opportunity than a cataclysmic event. Personally I think if we haven't hit the bottom yet we'll get there by September anyway which is approaching faster than anticipated.
The interesting thing about pairing everything to HBD is that HBD can be converted into Hive over a 3.5 day average (no liquidity required). That means a strong BTC/HBD pool still has very strong access to Hive by proxy through the conversion mechanics. A strong pairing to BTC, even though it doesn't directly involve Hive, is still very good for the Hive token. For example if we subsidized the yield for market makers in the BTC/HBD pool using DHF funding or some other source: that could easily pump the price of Hive and subsequently more than pay for itself. Of course that's not really different than gambling on leverage. Is the gamble worth it? Depends on the risk/reward calculation and a good amount of opinion/speculation.
If you're so inclined go check out the MAGI frontend Altera. It's not an exaggeration to say that should this protocol work as expected it could end up being one of the most valuable parts of our ecosystem for many years to come. Exchange listings have always been a huge problem for us. Ironically exchanges seem to want to list assets that can be frozen or controlled in a way that Hive is not capable of doing (or just demand a huge bribe in exchange for listing). Exchanges that have listed us have been slapped down by regulations multiple times now (Bittrex / Binance/ MEXC / ETC). Perhaps it's finally time to break free of this nonsense and pair ourselves directly to the Bitcoin mothership; Without permission.
