We are now already past halfway through 2020. Before the fork from Steem, SMTs was planned to be included on the upcoming hard fork. Even back then I've seen sentiments from some Steem users that while they obviously eager about the release of the protocol they also think "it's a little bit too late". SMTs were planned to be released back on 2017 and delayed to 2019 before it gets delayed again to 2020 because the team abandoned the development of the protocol to focus on MIRA and Hivemind. Just when the anticipated hard fork was incoming, Justin Sun happened. Steem and Hive split and there was huge hype surrounding the new Hive blockchain when it was just born. The price soared and even Vitalik Buterin was paying attention to it. The hype obviously didn't last long.
Hive market cap rank has been consistently out from the top 100 on both CoinMarketCap and @coingecko at the time of the writing of this post. Can we ever get back up there?
Is SMTs still relevant?
Being able to transact custom token with no fees is nice and all but after all this time is there anyone outside the Hive ecosystem that looks forward to it anymore? If the protocol were actually released on 2017 we would have huge head start but there's no point clinging over that notion, even now the protocol won't be released on the next hard fork and the testing is nowhere near finished yet. The thing is, people not only need to have the desire to use the protocol to actually use it but they also must be willing to move their operations to Hive in order to do so. Also, Ethereum 2.0 tesnet has been deployed. If the release of SMTs is not too far from ETH 2.0 release, the vast majority of people would rather wait for ETH 2.0 rather than using SMTs because there's simply way more economic activity on that chain compared to Hive, assuming they haven't given up after all this time.Curse of Bad Reputation
What's alarming about Hive's drop out from top 100 is Hive's (formerly Steem) reputation is far from good. Steem was one of the top 10 cryptocurrency back then but now it's relatively widely known that investing on it almost consistently underperforms compared to just investing on more mainstream cryptos like BTC or ETH. Hive's price track record so far reinforces that prejudice against it. The split from Steem really didn't help much. Repairing a damaged reputation is also much harder than earning it in the first place. I know it's anecdotal but from what I have observed Hive's reputation only good for a very short time after it's forked and then people outside simply stop caring. Really, Will Justin Sun even receive any repercussion for his actions on Steem at all?Hive's Economics is Problematic
Let's get to the point right away:- We have a stablecoin that isn't stable at all.
- It's way more time efficient to auto vote.
- It's way more profitable to auto vote.
- Big voters refuse to vote a post that already have modest rewards on it. (Not their fault)
- There is no good reason to actually trade fiat for HIVE.
- Combating abuse with downvotes is not only unrewarding but also have drawbacks.
- 50% HIVE/50% HP rule can be easily undermined by apps like @likwid and @reward.app
These doesn't even cover all the economic problems here. Surprisingly, these isn't being talked enough. Discussing economic change for this chain takes time I'm not seeing it. Does the community simply not care? If we are unsound economically what sets us apart from the legacy financial system again?