Hive to me comes from the distributed ledger technology and what that opens.
Hive offers a decentralized database that is more than just transactions information like a bank. Instead, it is more akin to Medium or other social media database.
This is very powerful and all Layer 2 can be built on that.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
And all of those transactions add up to build what could eventually be a strong web of trust system, but open source :)