It has been a challenging and a fantastic year for Hive. Looking back at 2021 we have overcome social, emotional, technical, and personal challenges. We've built strong relationships and taken major steps. We have done this together, as one decentralized ecosystem.
HIVE prices hit an all time high this year of $3.41 USD on November 26. While market trends naturally invite much speculation, the upward trend in price is an indication of strong investor confidence in the Hive ecosystem and its currency.
This summer we completed our latest major protocol update and successfully deployed it in Hard Fork (HF) 25. The update was dubbed 'Equilibrium' in honor of reaching a balance between capability, scaling and governance.
Hive-backed Dollars (HBD) are the feeless, trustless, US Dollar-pegged Hive stablecoin. This year with the help of several stabilization mechanisms we were able to maintain a fairly close peg with the USD, both through the expansion of on-chain conversion options and through layered tools. The ability to earn interest on HBD by simply moving it to the savings account was also added. Although the world has yet to see a truly versatile stablecoin, we are readily reaching for this goal.
The Hive Decentralized Fund (DHF) has seen both amazing growth and an increase in utility over the year. We are now up to a total of $10.8 million HBD up for distribution with a daily budget of 108k HBD. Over $79k HBD is being distributed daily.
Hive Communities saw monumental growth over the year. The LadiesOfHive community celebrated its 1st anniversary and launched its own token (LOH) in September. TheTerminal and HeyHaveYaMet projects both celebrated third anniversaries in December. The DreemPort project, focused on encouraging writers on Hive and building bridges between Hive and different publishing communities, was initiated in late June.
Most recently, the Gods Unchained community initiative was launched in December. It has onboarded nearly 1k new members and brought much excitement to the Hive ecosystem. It is the latest initiative alongside the ongoing onboarding program for quality content creators lead by the Original Content Decentralized (OCD) community. Related in scope is the Pizza Project which is a social group focused on building for Web3 and onboarding gamers and content creators to Hive. The project, launched in March, has grown to 7,500 token holders and 2,300 Discord members. Their first annual Hive Pizza Christmas album was just released.
Several dApps have joined the Hive ecosystem in 2021. Let's take a closer look at a few of them:
Inji, a new social media platform that aims to bridge Web3 and Web2 and leverages Hive for multiple features, has launched to much acclaim during HiveFest in November 2021. In the words of its founder, Timo: “Inji has been a passion project for the past 2 years. Finally launching it & seeing the Hive community starting to embrace inji, has been amazing. The feedback I’ve received so far has also been very valuable, but that’s simply the power of Hive. For 2022, my vision is to build the fundaments for inji to become one of the key players of social media platforms that are building on Web3, NFTs & the Metaverse."
Liketu has been in the works for longer than the existence of Hive. It's launch is but the first milestone of many to come. Although still early in its roadmap, Liketu will attempt to cement itself in a product niche under-developed on Hive. They will be pushing for wider user adoption, among short form visual creators. We believe that Liketu will help foster a whole new cohort of users on Hive adding to the already diverse offerings and helping to further the network effects of social media on Web3.
Podping is a strategic infrastructure partnership between the Podcast Index and Hive. For the first time since the creation of RSS feeds and podcasting in the early 2000's, there is now a global, decentralized notification system: Podping. Presently Podping sends out notifications of changes and updates when any one of 100's of 1000's of RSS Podcast feeds change. Simply by watching the Hive blockchain, any client can be notified of changes. Cross-platform "going live" notifications are coming in 2022. This is all made possible and simple by Hive's no-fee and ultra fast blockchain updates.
HiveLive was launched in December and is a web-service made to show an animation (with sound) and a message on livestreams to boost audience engagement during live session. It is designed to allow streamers to receive donations in not only HIVE/HBD, but also HiveEngine tokens, and provides a very easy-to-use donation page in addition to its core service.
NFT Showroom is a marketplace specializing in digital art, MP4s and audio NFTs from over 1500 artists all personally welcomed and onboarded from around the world. It prides itself on affordable minting fees, and an incredibly flexible auction system. Since it's inception over a year ago, artists on the platform have earned almost half a million HIVE totaling well over a million dollars USD, and sold over eleven thousand NFTs with 0 gas fees. NFT Showroom has recently acquired a dedicated space in the Cryptovoxels metaverse to hold events and create a more connected, social community and has attended HiveFest in AltspaceVR.
NFT Tunz was launched in the middle of Q4 2021 and the project has onboarded over 125 musicians, artists and music fans to date, including Number 1 chart-topping artist Sandi Thom. 2022 promises to be a huge year for music NFT's and NFT Tunz plans to be at the forefront of this exciting time on the Hive blockchain.
Hive Punks is a clone of the classic Crypto Punks series with fast free transactions on the Hive blockchain. Hive Punks has unique assets to create interesting Punks with actual names and professions. Hive Punks is a series of 10,000 NFTs which sold out in less than 36 hours and is supported by a secondary market. All Punks were randomly generated on-the-fly when minted backed by provably fair and verifiable algorithm supported with open source public repository.
Numerous Hive-based dApps, tools and projects saw significant milestones reached in 2021. Some of these are:
2021 was a breakout year for Splinterlands. It saw the release of guild brawls - allowing guilds to battle each other in weekly tournaments, the release of the Splintershards (SPS) governance token into the game which currently has over a $60M market cap, nearly 800k new Hive blockchain accounts created, and most recently the release of the largest new edition of cards to date - Chaos Legion! While 2021 has exceeded all expectations, 2022 is shaping up to blow it out of the water, and it is all powered by the Hive blockchain's fast, feeless transactions and user-friendly wallets.
This year the 3Speak team have helped to secure video-based free speech for all people using their desktop app, IPFS storage and Hive accounts layer. They have built the cross-chain SPK Network and a related Web3 tools layer with the aim to decentralize content on the internet, provide a rewards layer and run the needed infrastructure peer to peer. SPK Network progress is at about 35% since the build began in late September 2021.
DLUX (Decentralized Limitless User Experiences) is Hive's only metaverse platform with users actively posting things like this VR art gallery, and was updated in January to include 360° Photo Tours. This year also saw the introduction of generative NFTs that can be purchased then minted, similar to how card packs are purchased then opened. Finally, the DEX (decentralized exchange) was updated to support a multi-sig community wallet capable of partially filling orders, supporting a secondary Hive market for NFTs!
"The community is what makes a successful cryptocurrency project". Going with that idea the Hivefolks NFT project creators came out with another addition to the DLux NFT family; an NFT project honoring the long-standing members of the Hive community with NFT characters made in their likeness.
Hive Engine is an open source, community led, smart contracts development platform on Hive. It allows people to create their own fungible and non-fungible tokens. Users can take the tokens they build and place them into off the shelf community building front end websites. Participants benefit by being able to blog, participate in a DAO, stake liquidity in liquidity pools, buy and sell tokens on the markets, and build websites and games around off the shelf NFTs. Dozens of communities have been setup and over 2021 approximately $1 billion USD was transacted through the service.
Hive Keychain, a true Hive staple, is now used by over 100,000 users across browser extensions and mobile Apps. Hive Keychain is a wallet browser extension for the Hive blockchain and cryptocurrency and allows users to securely log into and access multiple Hive-based platforms.
Last week Hive community members challenged themselves to make posts to celebrate their individual 2021 highlights and wins. We've compiled them and are both humbled and proud to share them with you:
Akubillionnaire's Hive Highlight
Ambiguity's Hive Highlight
Artgirl's Hive Highlight
B0s's Hive Highlight
Bala41288's Hive Highlight
Baned's Hive Highlight
Beyondhorizonmm's Hive Highlight
Bhattg's Hive Highlight
Blacktarri's Hive Highlight
Boscohage's Hive Highlight
Brainstommer's Hive Highlight
Burlarj's Hive Highlight
CescaJove's Hive Highlight
Chincoculbert's Hive Highlight
Citimillz's Hive Highlight
Crrdlx's Hive Highlight
DavidBright's Hive Highlight
Deraaa's Hive Highlight
Dlmmqb's Hive Highlight
Doziekash's Hive Highlight
Drabs587's Hive Highlight
Dreemsteem's Hive Highlight
EddieSun's Hive Highlight
Emeka4's Hive Highlight
Enginewitty's Hive Highlight
Galenkp's Hive Highlight
Gladymar1973's Hive Highlight
Hepziba's Hive Highlight
IamDarrenClaxton's Hive Highlight
JameRussell's Hive Highlight
Jessicaossom's Hive Highlight
Jfang003's Hive Highlight
Joalvarez's Hive Highlight
Joshsticks28's Hive Highlight
Kenechukwu97's Hive Highlight
Khaleesii's Hive Highlight
Khoola's Hive Highlight
Killerwot's Hive Highlight
Kimavalon's Hive Highlight
L337m45732's Hive Highlight
Latino.Romano's Hive Highlight
Maryjacy's Hive Highlight
Mawit07's Hive Highlight
Maxelitereturned's Hive Highlight
Mcyusuf's Hive Highlight
Merit.Ahama's Hive Highlight
Mezume's Hive Highlight
Mofles's Hive Highlight
Mrenglish's Hive Highlight
Namelessnameless's Hive Highlight
Oluwalokcs's Hive Highlight
Papacrusher's Hive Highlight
Poggersdude's Hive Highlight
Pravesh0's Hive Highlight
Rayius's Hive Highlight
Readthisplease's Hive Highlight
Repayme4568's Hive Highlight
Rigel3100's Hive Highlight
Samostically's Hive Highlight
SamSmith1971's Hive Highlight
Samuel-Oguneso's Hive Highlight
Shadowspub's Hive Highlight
Shohana1's Hive Highlight
Simgirl's Hive Highlight
Snook's Hive Highlight
Stannee's Hive Highlight
Steemflow's Hive Highlight
TheHive's Hive Highlight
Theindiankid's Hive Highlight
Thekittygirl's Hive Highlight
Videoaddiction's Hive Highlight
Vikbuddy's Hive Highlight
Wrestlingdesires's Hive Highlight
Xplosive's Hive Highlight
Yaziris's Hive Highlight
Zonadigital21's Hive Highlight
It's been a terrific year for Hive and we are grateful to all of the community members, developers, builders, founders and investors for making it happen. Our commitment to decentralization is also our unity. Working together, we are excited to greet the new year and lay more bricks on the Web3 road.
