Something I always found amazing on Hive is our diversity in cultures we come from, continents, countries, timezones, or in the way we think or what drives us and what are our hopes.
Imagine the nightmare governments will go through trying to regulate a world-wide space that can't be centrally controlled.
On Hive, a pretty significant community is in the US. It is also important that the average American may be in the position to buy a little HIVE instead of being net sellers, unlike many other of our users around the globe, which may be in more difficult financial and life situations. From what I know, CEXes are still the most common on-ramping method into the crypto world and Hive is listed on only one major global CEX with enough liquidity, and that is Binance. The problem is Binance is no longer in the US, which left the US citizens with complicated routes to buy Hive, since they don't have a CEX available there with fiat support and HIVE listing, from what I understand.
I know from listening to the Hive Core Devs meetings, and now from what was mentioned at Hivefest, that @howo is working to create an API requested by Coinbase as a starter of discussions. If HIVE would be on Coinbase (that's a big if), that would make things easy for many Hivers over there who most likely use that exchange.
But... we have options. Or rather... they have options.
Generated with Ideogram.
At Hivefest Split, @vaultec demo-ed buying HIVE with USD in 30 seconds (well, it took a little more in the demo, but we'll forgive him, he couldn't scan the QR code from the big screen).
How did the process work?
- He logged in to his demo app with Metamask
- He went into the EVM wallet and entered the amount of HIVE that should be received
- A QR code was generated with a Lightning invoice
- He used Cash.App (available in the US too) to buy BTC with USD (because he didn't have any)
- He scanned the QR code to complete the transaction and checked the transactions log in the VSC app; within seconds the transaction was completed.
So, what happened?
He just bought HIVE with USD in the USA. Well, he wasn't in the US, but it should work in the US. And I suppose another app can be used instead, on the condition it supports Lightning Network, and potentially, USD to buy BTC.
This can be used by a US citizen wanting to buy HIVE with USD. He said the selling part will be available in the next few months.
The purchased HIVE would be in an EVM wallet on VSC. I'm not sure how that would go from there to Hive base layer, for example, but that would be easy to implement, I suppose, compared to the Bitcoin bridge.
Their target is also non-Hivers from the EVM chains, who don't need a Hive account to use VSC. That's why connecting with Metamask and the EVM wallet were a focus.
Note that this part is already functional, I mean you can see it at https://wrap.vsc.eco. I wouldn't do anything but small test transactions for now. I don't know what you could do with HIVE on VSC, in the EVM wallet for the time being.
But otherwise, impressive developments! Looking forward to see this integrated in more front ends on Hive.