Hive is the blockchain that is overlooked. That said, those of us who are involved with the blockchain each day know there is a lot being built. Each month we have new applications rolling out. At the same time, those that are already here receive upgrades.
This is presenting us with a situation where the offerings of the ecosystem keep increasing.
Hive has the reputation, at least among those who know about it, as being a social media ecosystem. It was, after all, built around the concept of blogging. While that is still a large portion of the activity, we are seeing other areas rising up.
One of those is gaming. This is due, mostly, to the success of Splinterlands. That became one of the top blockchain games, helping to elevate Hive. It is a fact that is reflected in the numbers.
According to the information by Dapp Radar, Hive was the number 3 blockchain in the month of March in terms of daily unique wallet addresses tied to gaming. It was overtaken by Polygon.
Obviously, we can see the overall numbers are not impressive in general. This shows how small blockchain gaming, like most of the cryptocurrency world, truly is. Nevertheless, as they say, any publicity is good publicity.
With things being so small, short term moves are bound to have a major impact. We also could see big changes in the rankings if a single game starts to get some attention. This is what happened with Polygon.
The difference between Hive and the #1 spot is a couple hundred thousand wallets. That might sound like a lot considering where things are yet, in the world of gaming, it is a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Why is gaming so important?
Simply it is one of the biggest markets there is in terms of users. The numbers are stunning, only outpaced by social media.
Here are some of what we are dealing with:
According to the latest data, there are approximately 3.09 billion active video gamers worldwide.
That figure has risen by over 1 billion in just seven years (that鈥檚 a 32% increase).
And the number of gamers is expected to hit 3.32 billion by 2024.
There are roughly 3 billion gamers right now. The largest blockchain has about 350K unique wallets. Since we can presume there is some percentage that are bots, we know the number of individual (human) users is lower.
This shows there is a lot of room for growth.
In fact, the gaming market has a current valuation of $197.11 billion.
And numbers continue to grow with each passing year. By 2025, the gaming industry is set to be worth over $268 billion.
This is an enormous number. The valuation is expected to grow significantly. We are not only dealing with a large user base, the growth rate is fantastic.
All of this spells big potential for Hive.
This also highlights how important numbers are and on-chain activity. It is easy to fall into the idea that engagement does not matter. We see a lot of people on Hive interacting on Twitter and Discord while doing almost nothing on-chain.
The numbers compiled by Dapp Radar shows that entities are looking at what is taking place. Transactions do matter as do number of wallets. A few thousand people extra logging in and engaging does make a big difference.
Many of us believe Hive offers some very unique benefits that we do not see elsewhere in cryptocurrency. A lot of this is technical, applying to scaling. However, we do see some things such as the resource credit system which separates Hive from the rest of the blockchain world.
This is something that we should be able to leverage for much better ranking. One thing to keep in mind, within blockchain gaming, any data posted to the network comes with zero transaction fees. This is not the case with Polygon or Wax. Each carries with it some fees to interact.
Of course, there is the fact that Hive has no smart contract capability, at least on the base layer. With gaming, this is a big drawback since much of that is centered around non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Nevertheless, that is a situation that is being worked upon and addressed. We do have DLUX and a couple other options that are popping up.
Hive should strive to be the #1 blockchain for gaming. This is a position the community should set out to achieve.
The reason for this is the sheer numbers involved. Also, it is helpful to stake a position before the fireworks take place. We can see the numbers are not that elevated so we are not trying to take over the entire gaming world. It is likely we see a couple more smart contract platforms live before the end of this year. That should really help the gaming aspect of the ecosystem.
We know we have Ragnarok that is operating on testnet. This is a game that might not attract huge numbers in terms of users but does have a lot of people excited. Then we have PsyberX which is a shooter game, something that is very popular in the world of gaming. Finally, we saw a couple more games emerging over the last few weeks, just adding to the offering.
The point is we have a nice foundation upon which to build. It is important to start generating some momentum. Splinterlands is a nice game yet we need 5 of them.
That would catapult Hive to the top of lists like this.
It should be a focus since we know blockchain gaming is going to explode in the future. Positioning Hive to take advantage of that is only to our benefit.
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