My Hoarding Continues to Expand!

This weekend I was able to surpass another interesting milestone in my journey here in the Steem ecosystem. What was encouraging was that I had achieved over 500k Partiko points only a couple of short months since achieving 100k. While this mostly has had to be due to the fact that they aggressively expanded the ways the community can engaged to earn the points, I have continued to rely heavily on the mobile application to explore the community and ecosystem beyond what I was able to do before discovering it. Despite some reductions in the time I have had to engage, I continue to curate and engage while using the Partiko mobile application.

I wanted to take advantage of the 500k milestone to also capture my place on the leaderboard as Partiko themselves are right behind me and it may be the closest I get to achieving being in the Top 5 among users. I am a competitive person and always strive to do well in everything that I participate in. If there is a leaderboard, I strive to get there as a demonstration of my perseverance and dedication to delivering results. Someone else who had achieved these results had mentioned this being another way to gain some attention towards the content we produce which is what has really got me focused on moving towards these metrics.

However, this has also led me to see where I was at a couple of tokens that I have also been accumulating for the past few months! I was pleasantly surprised to see how fast some of these balances grow over time according to how their Proof of Activity algorithm works. These could be the future of my path towards continuing growing my Steem account and eventually achieve to be an Orca in the Steem blockchain. These, like @actifit and @steemhunt demonstrates how new users can come in and start building strong presence by just engaging in the ecosystem and the need to really invest money is option; the freemium model many also mention

The question remains what to do with these resources as they eventually get to be opportunity costs that we sit on. When it relates to Partiko, some have speculated that they may issue tokens that could potentially be exchanged for upvotes and other benefits. As we have also seen, many tokens have been able to achieve a market for values as participants have looked to purchase some for their communities. What will become interesting over time is how these tokens could ultimate be exchanged among each other and allows the user to choose where focus can be at allocating value to the resources remaining.

This has just become more relevant for myself as I have become heavily invested in @steemmonsters and @splinterlands. They have just deployed their own token, Dark Energy Crystals (DEC), which are an in-game currency you earn many different ways; but most obviously, just playing. They have gone on to create an economy to expand engagement both in the game and in the rest the ecosystem as the tokens can be used to promoted posts as well! I jumped on the bandwagon here and went on to purchase DEC with fiat in order to purchase some cards to add and build my Collection but now that the market for DEC has grown, I may have to hold on to them a bit given the potential they have.

While my hoarding will eventually have to come to an end, I continue to be encouraged with the amount of development that continues to occur around the ecosystem with the support of the community. While the engagement has not risen notably across the ecosystem, the sentiment has seen an improvement and it really has been due to how the protocol has proven to be more capable and flexible in a short time span despite the adversity seen from an economic perspective. This could begin the momentum needed to attract more developers and others to the ecosystem to create value for the community which continues to seem eager for more!