People are buying into Hive to qualify for the 100K total hive airdrop by Huobi.
It's not entirely clear to me how the Huobi airdrop incentivizes buying HIVE as opposed to storing it on the exchange. The fine print:
Top 100 HIVE Net Deposit users with HIVE Net Deposit Volume > 5,000HIVE during promotion period can each receive 1,000 HIVE. Only users who have completed ID verification can receive the award.
Top100 ranking is measured by HIVE Net Deposit Volume, whereby:
HIVE Net Deposit Volume = HIVE Deposit Volume - HIVE Withdrawal Volume
So it seems like there is an incentive to deposit HIVE to Huobi. But there is no incentive to buy HIVE. In fact, having deposited large amounts of HIVE, the only thing to do is sell. So it seems to me that the airdrop creates downward price pressure?
Also I'm not sure HIVE withdrawals are enabled yet (can someone confirm)? This means it's not a strategy to buy hive, withdraw / sell, and then deposit to Huobi account.
Most hive users have their hive powered up. It takes 13 weeks to power down. So any meaningful hive people want to transfer to Huobi must be bought from the exchanges. That creates the buying pressure. Prices rally, more people buy it and it shows up on every trading scan. Traders gets interested and buys more. Prices rally more. Hope this helps.
But that would mean users are buying Hive on other exchanges to deposit on Huobi. But 90% of the 24-hour volume is coming from Huobi.
Yes, they are new customers. Or existing customers using the new exchange.