A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Hive, as we know it today, is full of design choices. Most of them were made many years ago, by people who are AFAIK not around anymore.
Hivepower
One of those design choices is staked HIVE aka HIVEPOWER also known as VESTS.
HIVEPOWER can be unstaked, which takes 13 weeks, 1/13th is unlocked every week.
Rewards
Author rewards are paid either 50% or 100% in HIVEPOWER.
Curation rewards are paid 100% in HIVEPOWER.
Witness rewards are paid 100% in HIVEPOWER.
You might ask yourself: why aren't the rewards just paid out in liquid HIVE?
An answer could be that this would reduce "selling-pressure". But I'd argue that it's actually delayed selling pressure, like pushing things under your bed, making it look like you cleaned up, while actually you just delayed a full cleanup.
Or in other words: if people want to sell, they will sell. Rewards in HIVEPOWER in that sense are just a burden along the way and potentially also a way for sell-pressure to be centered along bull-runs, as many people might powerdown at a similar time.
Liquid HIVE = Freedom
You might have noticed that I've started using the liquid rewards option via the 3rd party @reward.app tool.
That way I'm able to dynamically decide when I want to sell my author rewards. Or if I want to hold onto them or even power them up, which IMO is a much better idea in a bear-market than in a bull-market. You want to be as liquid as possible in these times. (no finance. advice)
What do other projects do?
Let's take Uniswap as an example. You can "lock" your rewards within a liquidity pool, which gives you an ERC20 token based on the trading pair - i.e. ETH/UNI that makes you eligible for trading fees.
These trading fees aren't automatically available as liquid tokens in your wallet, probably because it would create way too many transactions (and GAS is expensive).
Instead, you can receive your rewards by removing liquidity. See image below.
That means, the only thing stopping your from receiving and potentially selling your earned rewards or even whole provided liquidity on Uniswap is a single transaction, which might be expensive, depending on gas usage.
Freedom + Incentives = God Tier Project
So, what's the gist of it?
I believe it's important to give users as much freedom as possible, no unnecessary lockups while also providing uber incentives so people don't actually want to sell their tokens, though they could so instantly if they wanted to.