When trading, it's not about projects or essentials, but about making money. You don't care what you trade, as long as you can make money.
I don't think that HIVE is a pump and dump coin
Every coin is a pump and dump coin if there's someone out there with a considerable amount to move the market. $HIVE is not any different. If you look at the chart, you can see huge buy orders executed during a specific trading session, always the same (we know who they are), which caused big moves to the upside (as back then we didn't have perp futures to short it, but we have now), which then on a higher time frame resulted in a big upside wicks, because there was no more buying pressure. Those tokens are going to be sold at the right time, mark my words. I've posted about this, but you can also check as the charts don't lie.
Does having a future market change anything for the big buyers/sellers?
Yes, quite a lot in my opinion. $HIVE is now a tradable asset, which means more volatility and opportunity to accumulate more on exchanges for both small and big players.
This way Hive, as a progect, gets more visibility and opportunity to attract more users, investors, big players included. Obviously this is a probability and depends a lot on how things will develop onchain, but it is definitely a step forward and much needed as well.
If you look at the price action $HIVE printed the last couple of days, when most of the alts were bleeding, $HIVE bounced off the $0.288 level (I missed the level in my TA post by $0.005), recovered quite fast and holding nicely so far.
It is definitely a good thing and should have happened a long time ago.
Sure, they can pump and dump HIVE, but it is not the same with other alts. If so, why we are blogging here, why we stake HIVE then? We could only trade it.
It is the same, just in a different way. Other projects also have staking options and so on.