I recently read the post for the latest proposal by @stoodkev and the Keychain Team which would allow the creation of new hive accounts in a much simpler way, using account creation tokens. I also went into their discord and found a very interesting link to a page called Keychain stores. This is a world map that shows all the existing stores that accept Hive and HBD as a means of payment.
This got my attention and I had a closer look. First I was disapointed not to find any shop in my closer neighborhood. To be precise, there isn't any shop in Europe that is listed on this website. There are for the moment 21 stores listed and the big majority (actually all of them) is situated in central in south America. There is a shop in Mexico, one in Cuba and 19 shops are situated in Venezuela!
Venezuela is taking the lead for the spread of Hive in real life payments
Who on Hive hasn't read a post or watched a video about Hive Sucre? Well this community is not only active on Hive, they are active in real life and implementing a real network of shops that accept Hive or HBD as a payment.
(source: https://stores.hive-keychain.com/)
In Cumana alone, there are about 12 shops listed on this website. Each read dot on Keychain-stores comes with the address and the website of the shop. It's definitely a great start and it seems that word of it already spread into the surrounding towns where some shops are listed as well.
Cumaná is the capital city of Venezuela's Sucre State. It is located 402 kilometres east of Caracas. There are about 425'000 inhabitants in this city.
(source: Wikipedia)
The power of the network effect
Trying to implement Hive as a payment service seems to be very tough in a landscape where hardly anybody even knows what Hive is. It's totally different however if you are faced with a base of active users in a close geographical context. If you know that many other shops around you already use Hive/HBD and that plenty of people actually own hive and have the keychain app on their mobile devices, then the decision to implement Hive/HBD in your shop becomes much easier.
The people who push Hive in Cumana do an amazing job because they managed to reach a certain threshold of shops and users that adopted hive. From here, I suppose that it becomes much easier to actually onbord more people and more shops. Once the initial effort is provided to created a basic network and a minimum adoption, I believe the expansion will go on automatically. I can't evaluate whether in Cumana this threshold has been reached already. If yes, how long will it take for the surrounding towns to jump on the wagon and do the same?
I believe that this is a great example how hive adoption can be pushed. Encouraging the adoption of a small community and onbord people in a relatively closed location. Get some shops on bord and then work on getting more.
When as a shop owner you see this community growing, you want to have their business and that's why a shop owners has a big incentive to adopt Hive/HBD, the bigger the local Hive community becomes. I believe that there will come a point, where the movement spreads by itself.
A great tool with no costs
Hive Keychain is a great tool for small shops. It allows the payment in 3 seconds without any costs. You get a stable coin linked to the USD that you can swap for hive if you want to. Especially in a country where inflation is bad like Venezuela, this can be a game changer. Then you can actually let this money work for you in HBD savings or as Hive Power.
I believe that the best for Hive would be if the „plan“ for Cuman was applied to other geographical locations in the world. This could help to spread this great blockchain in a way that no other crypto project has been able to affect real life business.
Let's connect ! You can find me on these platforms: