Here in the Philippines, we have a huge community of Hive users for both on content posting and gaming.

What we really wished for is to help us facilitate the inclusion of Hive and HBD to some of our local crypto-exchanges.

So that, a solid use cases can be easily comprehensible among Filipinos who are already in crypto but not yet on Hive.

The Hive communities in the Philippines is poised to be a leader in the number of users in Hive.

We badly need it in the most possible time.

-guruvaj
a member of the dbuzz and hiveph community

We are told that exchanges often require a legal entity to sign a contract when adding crypto tokens and Hive does not have such a legal entity or figurehead to sign such an agreement. However, that doesn't seem to have been a problem for Bitcoin - which is one of the only other truly decentralised projects that (afaik) lacks such a legal entity.

We have a contact within a large exchange and are waiting comment on this exact issue.

It is a point of argument that can be used by Hive “proponents” to these crypto e changes.

I am not party to this endeavor, but as a community onboarder on the DBuzz app, Hive will be far more attractive to common folks to try on if they have clear exit strategies of their activities on Hive.

So far, “peer to peer” trading of Hive/HBD is being done among various community groups within DBuzz and HivePh (and Spl) communities.

Yes, having Hive listed on as many exchanges as possible ideal from the perspective of decentralisation and for marketing purposes. Steps are underway to increase the ability to trade Hive outside of centralised exchanges, but if we can help to make onboarding of Hive onto CEXs then we will do.

Lastly, excited to see how the Philippines places from your data gathering efforts, since, my country tends to be a lead in social media use.

Our team is only fluent in English, so we may need help from community members to translate text if we are to reach non English speaking regions. I see, though that the Philippines has English as an official language, so we can definitely include that region in appropriate ways.

Analysing the nationalities and languages of Hive users will be part of our first stage, the census.

Salamat po. ❤️🇵🇭❤️
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

This is absolutely an argument that works with exchanges- many of them are very interested in the idea of us and are appreciative of everything about hive. The problem is, that doesn't negate their need to do the things that come with touching traditional finance and government regulation. We are actively working with one of the biggest exchanges in the Philippines right now who are very pleased and look forward to listing hive, but the process is dragging very very slowly because of how difficult the legal situation is to handle. We are working our way through it, but it usually means a lot of individual legal opinions and also the need for community members to take on culpability tasks with these exchanges, and for them to work with their own legal teams to change their policies to work around us.

You mentioned that Bitcoin essentially got listed because it was first and the regulation didn't exist at that time. So I take it that the regulations aren't retroactive and Bitcoin is 'too big to fail' in that sense?

I can't speak for them, but I suspect it's a bit on the nose. The reality is, Bitcoin literally created the need for exchanges and the regulatory due diligence landscape has changed so extremely in the past few years that every month that goes by may or may not change things substantially in our favour. I suspect that as long as they pay their pound of flesh to the Gov, there's no need to go back the decade and a half and fill in "Satoshi" on the "legal entity" line. That's a guess though. As saying above to @guruvaj, right now Coins.PH and I are banging our heads together on how to help them enter into a contract with a trustless DAO for culpability reasons. As such, on most of our listings and almost every single CEX NDA, I am personally fully doxxed. I very, very, very much do not like that at all, but there is no one else who will and as such, it's something that I do my best to go over with my personal lawyer to protect myself as best I can and keep us moving forward on these things.

DEX options really are the future we need to pursue- lol.

I can really feel your predicament about this, we hope we can push it more as a community.

And we really love you for the efforts that you are doing❤️❤️❤️

I don't know much about the legal rules surrounding relationships between exchanges and token operators, but at least in Britain there are a few ways to define the situation which bypass much of the issues (note: not legal advice). There is an allowance for organisations to be defined as a club for legal purposes. A community of people joining together to achieve their goals.

It seems that the issue of them requiring someone to be named and held responsible in the event of bad behaviour is a bit pointless anyway, since the scale of the community and the potential problems that the exchange might experience are much larger than one person will typically be able to be sued for anyway. I would hope that these places wouldn't end up trying to put you in jail personally if an exchange claimed that Hive's technology had somehow defrauded them!

Seems these folks need a good hard drink of that Satoshi spirit! 😁

> on most of our listings and almost every single CEX NDA, I am personally fully doxxed. I very, very, very much do not like that at all, but there is no one else who will and as such, it's something that I do my best to go over with my personal lawyer to protect myself as best I can and keep us moving forward on these things.

Can't the DHF pay for a Directors & Officers (D&O) type insurance policy for you, similar to what corporations do with their directors, CEOs and top management teams?

NOTE: If the DHF funds this, make sure the policy includes "tail coverage". The tail means that any actions taken by you while the policy was in effect will be covered by the policy even if the policy itself is allowed to lapse.

This is a great point that I will look into for sure asap! Ideally, we will and do need a small, well delineated foundation. That is something that I very much hope some more people do some work on and I see a few more willing self starters speak up about. I will be referencing soon in a post, but for some of the asks that a community has, something more structured will have to be created, and I'm honestly already doing three full time hive jobs so it would be good to have a bit more collaboration on making that happen.

Thanks Crim❤️
Being a decentralized blockchain has its difficulties in this manner, and I really feel bad that our regulatory authorities here in the Philippines and its laws are “not forward looking” to cater to Web3 platforms yet.

So, I talk about this everywhere and to everyone who will listen, but I will copy some relevant details here as it often gets murky in the repeating. Legal is a huge part of CEX exchange listing and it's a very different regulatory landscape from when Bitcoin was getting listed everywhere.... Arguably without Bitcoin there would be no CEXs period, but in most cases it really comes down to a combination of things that make us a difficult add, especially these days where EVM chains are almost instant no dev-overhead business endeavours, we are a coat/benefit/time deficit and so our listings often take longer. At current we're currently in the legal/due diligence stages with five large CEXs, and realistically, overall more volume will continue to make it easier to help out way some of the more difficult aspects such as no legal entity. I worked for about 7 months with Binance US to negotiate and do all the legal for a listing... And then.... Well! There's that regulatory landscape again.

Here's a long snip of some of the discussion that often comes up each time people sort of say 'well, we've given up on listings and the big whales want us not to get listed.' That really couldn't be much further from the truth but it helps to get more understanding of the sort of multifaceted challenge that we present in our current for to the biggest CEXs we're not currently listed with:

> Market Making when combined with legal liability risks and development overhead

> This is the thing making our lives a living hell, at current. We wonder how low cap alts and shitty PnDs rocket past us, or why our organic volumes aren't where we want them to be. In a perfect world, this type of service wouldn't be the basis for every coin's volume, but that's not the world we live in.

>This is coming up right now because once again, after months of talks with a huge wallet integration- we got stonewalled again. I can talk my way into every meeting. I can get people excited about us. I can often find tricky ways to get around some of the worst legal issues and can almost always negotiate out of listing fees.

>But more and more frequently, as new projects rise, and foundations splash out heavy cash to kickstart the baseline for other chain's marketcaps, I'm being told that the line where we will NOT be listed or integrated is based on our volume, and specifically, that we do not run or do not use a market maker.

>I have two exchanges at current in limbo because they're waiting on some legal stuff which is in the process of being handled, but they've been very clear that they simply will not list if we do not have some form of MM.

>Many CEXs have their own you can pay into, which is basically extortion, but there are many other outside options from buy in to lending based. I don't have a strong opinion on what we do. But I'm being very open and clear right now that this is actively a very real and very problematic stumbling block. And whether we like it or not, this is how coins that don't get seen move themselves up. It's a race to the bottom to get to the top. I well understand this doesn't fit with our ethos.

>With all that being said, at some point we have to realize that we have to operate to the best of our abilities to really make a better web3, and play along with the others just enough to make sure we aren't left behind. This is becoming enough of a common theme (me being told "thanks, but hive is no longer/not on our roadmap" directly) that it's a good time for all of us to evaluate at what point we want to stick to this choice or if we want to try to use some of these tools to give ourselves a leg up and get people's eyes on us again. Price action and volume are big ways to do that, and when it comes to businesses who need to make a profit, we either have to pay them directly or show them we have the ability to drive fee generation, or they will keep showing us the door.

>I'm actually always super proud when I can say that overall, pretty much all of our volume is driven by the general markets and they're all well aware that this is actually really abnormal in our space, which goes to show just how much sticking power we have- but especially these days, wallet integrations, website integrations, and exchange listings need to look out for themselves as much as I have to fight for Hive's needs- and they're getting very comfortable telling me, "you know what? thanks, but no thanks."

>There's a constant stream of complaints that we don't get enough of the 'right' exchange listings, but the biggest difficulty apart from the legal stuff is our volume. So, we either have to work together to provide infra to start targeting DEXes, or we have to become a bit more flexible in what behaviour we want to be willing to put up with to give ourselves a shot in the arm on the charts to help us bring notice to the rest of what's happening here.

>As mentioned, even though our setup is small, easy and costs little, these wallets and exchanges won't consider even looking twice at us if they see there's no money to be made at all... so take the cost and dev deficit of adding a new protocol over a one click copy and paste style deployment of an EVM meme coin who'll pay to MM, they'll take the short run of crazy high fee profit over us, ever single time. And that's how you get chains like Tron being lauded as 'the next hot thing' for tokenization and getting added to literally every interface, exchange, wallet, and web3 service going while legitimate, battle tested longevity tech gets left out on the cold.

> I think we'd be remiss to stand out here shivering forever knowing that every cycle that we slowly slip backwards and stagnate in terms of attention is something that we could potentially choose a few places to 'go along to get along' and really change, as volume and green trends tend to take on a life of thier own pretty quickly in our space.

>It's less about what I want and more about making sure that a lot of our biggest accounts who have strong opinions on guiding the overall ethos and sentiment of the chain are informed about what's happening... Which is basically that some of the big players we have been chasing are getting really comfortable saying 'no, not viable for our roadmap' to us where they used to say 'soon :tm:'

>Any time we get far enough to get expectation number and pre-integration approval, it comes with an NDA, which is standard from any of the bigger exchanges. For example, Bitfinex's head of listings has told me directly in a call, with a few witnesses that while they love the idea of us, there will be no movement forward on listing until an MM is secured and provided to them for review (or they will recommend us an 'investor level' one,) because we do not meet the volume and needs of the bulk of their clientele.

>We don't currently have any potential listings who have not agreed to waive their listing fee, so just to clarify these are MM services, which usually amount to locking up X amount of token with them, or with another outfit, as secured and guaranteed liquidity.

>Depending on the type of MM/liquidity provider, how they make their money differs - either they skim off the top of every trade after you give them lots and lots of coins to work with so there are lots and lots of trades to skim off of, they take a large amount for themselves period as upfront payment and then just trade with what's left with a rough guarantee to hit certain targets, or in the case of an exchange depending on the player-- the trust aspect is much 'better' but of course you're handing them a pile of your own reserves to literally trade profitably against you with.

>In the case of ANY MM option, it would need to likely be funded by a proposal, so the numbers would obviously never go without some form of community approval. However, right now, the vast majority of people in here are dead set against ever playing this game at all, which it's becoming time to broach the wider discussion. I can absolutely chase this down with aggression if we want to start collecting options and being more informed.

>Basically, we just have to get over the mindset hurdle of 'do we want to play into this aspect of the industry?' because that's our first step. It is gross, and we don't always want to spend, but the flip side is why would people buy Hive directly on an exchange with poor liquidity when they can buy or sell literally anything else with more flexibility and then swap in only when needed, etc? The answer currently is, they just won't, and don't. So a new exchange, or especially multi-chain wallet integrations, look at relatively no one buying and go, 'why should I care?' It's a question we have to mull over a bit as part of our cycle planning, basically.

>Kraken we've even had community members who work there (in non-listing positions) do internal presentations and we can't get a listing consideration. Volume, and our legal and corporate structure are the biggest blockers for them. I usually do the diligence paperwork about three times a year. I have negotiated and am in the process of acquiring finalized, fairly low pricedHive specific legal opinions from two acceptable countries (we were listed with Steem documents, and I use Steemit inc's legal opinions in all new listings. Embarrassing, but also not ideal for US compliant exchanges) which I hope will really help on that front.

>Coinbase is much the same- exchanges that operate in the US are under HELLA scrutiny, so they are much, much, MUCH more unforgiving of listing applications that do not have doxxed team, corporate address and legally culpable representatives/structures, which of course is one of the absolute hardest things for us. It's not a straight up impossible thing, nor is it solely money or solely legal... it's the awful triple threat kiss of death that we are low volume so taking a risk on us isn't a windfall of profit, we're almost completely anon and no one can be pointed to on paper as the person to sue if we do something shitty so they can pass along any legal accountability, and that we are an entirely different protocol that requires the memo-database setup that means that they have to actually do work that we don't pay listing fees to cover to properly integrate us instead of just using their existing EVM code to add every single new token that gets pooped out.

>I'm bound and determined to get them, which is why I keep starting these convos and I'm trying to get around some of these blockers (like the legal opinions), it's just one ridiculously long slog that needs something to give to help up our attractiveness. Volume is some of the lowest hanging fruit.

Thanks for the detailed and excellent comment on this topic!

I was aware of the situation with market making in general and also how dubious many of the practices are on centralised exchanges, but it's clear that Hive is competing in a marketplace within exchanges and needs to 'do different' somehow.

If there is a straightforward and logical solution here, it seems to be to increase the userbase of Hive and to increase demand and trading volume for the token. It would be helpful to know the kind of range of volume that you might have been told is a rough threshold for listing on some of the more busy/desirable exchanges.

It is initially sad to think that a powerfully decentralised project doesn't get enough love in the 'decentralised' marketplace because it is too decentralised and has a bit too much intention to stick to ethical ideas! However, I can also see how this could be carefully turned around in marketing messaging to help people see Hive as one of the few crypto projects sticking to the kind of principles that created Bitcoin.

It's already clear that a lack of public trust is a huge issue with crypto project promotion, so finding ways to educate the world on some deeper truths about the industry could achieve two goals in one - both building trust in Hive and also differentiating it from the competition. Clearly that would need to be done in ways that don't annoy the exchanges too, if possible!

I also wonder if there is a way to excite exchanges to use Hive as a platform to grow their own communities - it seems like a 'no brainer' on the surface, but as you pointed out - they seem to focus exclusively on trade income and not so much on human potential/needs. They could certainly gain some positive PR if they were to be seen to participate in projects that support real communities, instead of effectively operating along the same lines as the banks that crypto was intended to replace.

It would also be good to know some of the costings and general details of the market making options being suggested. All the available options for growth should ideally be considered by the community, even if we eventually agree that these particular ones aren't appropriate.

We will absolutely cover this topic as best we can when gathering data for this proposal, should it be funded. Sometimes just having greater clarity on a topic like this can inspire change to come in unexpected ways!

> If there is a straightforward and logical solution here, it seems to be to increase the userbase of Hive and to increase demand and trading volume for the token.

The classic apothegm stating the problem: ¿Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

How to increase the userbase of Hive and to increase demand and trading volume for the token if we do not have enough exchanges (CEX) available in the market to purchase Hive with fiat money or trade other crypto tokens for Hive or HBD?

> I also wonder if there is a way to excite exchanges to use Hive as a platform to grow their own communities - it seems like a 'no brainer' on the surface, but as you pointed out - they seem to focus exclusively on trade income and not so much on human potential/needs.

C'mon bro! Has no one told you yet that crypto exchanges are just businesses? Businesses like any other? Businesses that only deal with money as their only tangible and essential product and from which they profit just as traditional banks do?

What freaking interest they might have neither in growing communities nor people nor in human potential/needs? They don't care about anything of that bro. The only thing they are interested in is making monetary profits and growing further to get even more money and profits! Again, just like traditional banks.

Hi, thanks for your comments. Businesses often engage in community outreach and also community building for various PR aligned reasons. The exchange industry is very competitive and any organisation claiming to value decentralisation needs to reflect that claimed ideal over the long term. I appreciate that few may be interested in much outside of their balance sheets, but that is unfortunate and with enough grass roots momentum they may eventually find their lack of connection to their audience is their undoing!

> Hi, thanks for your comments. Businesses often engage in community outreach and also community building for various PR aligned reasons.

Oh yeah, that's true. But the main "PR aligned reason" usually is because their local or external governments in some way or another force them to cover their part of "social responsibility" with the community.

> The exchange industry is very competitive and any organisation claiming to value decentralisation needs to reflect that claimed ideal over the long term.

That's true also. There is too much competition in this industry, simply because it is too easy to obtain exaggerated and large monetary and financial profits from this activity without producing absolutely anything tangible and of value and living only from speculation and people's expectations. I hate to say this, but again, just as the traditional banks.

> I appreciate that few may be interested in much outside of their balance sheets, but that is unfortunate and with enough grass roots momentum they may eventually find their lack of connection to their audience is their undoing!

Yeah, let's continue to be naive and optimistic. And let's hope that one day some rebel with many contacts, relationships and opulence will emerge in this industry and who is truly willing to overturn this current paradigm of the financial industry.

One of the long term vision of decentralisation is to balance the playing field between individuals and larger entities, more than can otherwise be achieved. As time passes and as software improves, it becomes more and more feasible to create systems with blockchains that challenge larger organisations. It's not impossible that they may gradually find they go the way of mainstream TV shows that once dominated public perception, but which today are often outperformed by social media video profiles online.

We have perhaps got quite a journey to complete before that happens - but as times become tougher, people will gradually be forced to live smarter and to be more self reliant. While this is in some senses the opposite of what large financial corporations often want, they may need to respond to it anyway.

I am old enough to remember life before crypto - it might not seem like a huge paradigm shift has been building since then, but in many ways it is.

As already said before, let's hope that one day some heretical rebel with many contacts, relationships, opulence and popular support will emerge in this industry and who is truly willing to overturn the current paradigm that the financial industry is showing today.

> I am old enough to remember life before crypto - it might not seem like a huge paradigm shift has been building since then, but in many ways it is.

Yeah, in many ways it is. But there are some of us who are already way too old, that I'm afraid we will no longer be present to celebrate the crystallization of that huge paradigm shift. };)

Well, there are many possible avenues for significant change of that kind - in fact it seems more likely to me that we will see this emerge in some of the 'poorer' parts of the world as a result of their need to survive/thrive and the limited array of other options available to them due to the biases of the existing mainstream economic systems.

I don't know exactly how long you plan on sticking around on Earth, but I will remind you that change is the only constant :)

There's a lot that we could go back and forth on here, but overall I agree- every single exchange that we work with, we attempt to get posting here on chain. Most don't have the time or effort to put into that type of marketing overhead, as again, perceived value of community building here based on volume is a big one vs other places they could be using. I have explained at length how they can use our incentive structure to create passionate brand ambassadors with basically no expenditure, but it hasn't been enough of a draw as of yet. I have one or two we're working with to at very least make introductions on chain.

To be very honest, Binance sort of swept everyone on this by releasing Binance square- we had a few meetings trying to convince them to use Hive as the basis for that system since we literally already have it built, but unfortunately too much lay outside of their control and it did not tie back to their own tokens. We are actually working with them now to try to figure out if they will graciously allow us to connect RSS feeds from our content here to their platform there, lol, so we shall keep at it.

As for MM/Liquidity- any amount at all would have to be paid by DAO, and therefore would have to be public. This certainly does raise some issues, as almost every company and platform providing numbers will NOT allow you to share the costs (similar to most listing deals) and will put a rep under NDA. It also means that they structure their documents and pitches to us a little differently, but I've been approaching all our exchange partners recently to see if I can at least collect some broad info on expectations and what could be provided on platform, to give us an idea if we want to look to intermediary options for the future or bother to do it at all.

Ah, I hadn't heard of Binance square - I just tried to look at it but was told it's not active in my region. I'll try to bypass that somehow. It sounds like the usual story of large corporations wanting to control every aspect of their process in-house as much as possible.

I see the problem with market making, yes. It's katch 22 in that the community can't vote on a proposal to support market making without public access to the terms, which they service providers aren't willing to facilitate.

The De-Fi liquidity pool approach could be a viable alternative. It's not an area I am an expert in, but perhaps @vaultec's plans will offset the problems with centralised exchanges?

The immediate goal is to bring wrapped Bitcoin onto Hive & startup liquidity pools pairing HIVE:BTC HBD:BTC for starters. From there we can pretty easily add LTC, DOGE where a good % of the money is add. From there assuming our development is funded, we can continue to build and start looking and integrating all similar EVM chains for wrapping. Wrapped bitcoin alone will be invaluable to have and would give us a significant source of liquidity. Longer term the more pairs that are added the more options become available and cross trading between pairs at low fees

That's my vision, it certainly isn't easy, but we can moving towards it and it'll become available this year.

Thanks for explaining. So would this setup be accepted for listing on some of the more well known liquidity / DeFi / trading sites? Or is there a reason why it would have to be limited to running on your/our own custom built sites?

You can tell your local exchanges that they can run their own hive node and have direct access to the chain.
Just send them to the discord: https://discord.gg/FuNWCTW6EH
People can direct them from there.
I'd push access to hbd as a hook.

We need more warm bodies to push this further.

So happy to see a comprehensive marketing proposal that begins with research. I'll watch the conversation here with great interest—lots of overlap with things I have cooking on various fronts. Proposal merrily supported!

Thankyou, yes, maybe we can collaborate to some extent to achieve shared goals. :)

For sure. With your proposal now published I can definitely see some linkage between UNHIDE and Strategizer. When I start shopping my project around to others, I intend also to let them know / remind them about this action oriented proposal.

Let me know your preferred way to get in touch / collaborate. I feel like we both may need a little while for the dust to settle and gather community feedback—but in a few weeks it'd be great to touch base and see where it all stands!

Excellent, yes, it's best to let this proposal go through it's process first. I'm available on a few chat systems, you can just direct message me (ura) in the developer Hive chat and we can go from there. :)

This is one of the best DHF Proposals I have seen. If I don't see @strategizer get funding, I may have to even rethink my investment in HIVE. Currently most of my portfolio is on HIVE or projects that are built on top of HIVE. If the community is not ready to help HIVE grow, what are we even doing!

Best of Luck! I will try to promote this with the limited reach I have.

We agree 100%. Thanks so much for your support, we appreciate it and you!

I'm extremely happy to see proposal like yours go live. I'm eagerly awaiting to see it at funded over the next few days. There are only 12 voters so far. I will write more about the project to see if I can get more eyeballs.

Thanks so much!

You deserve it!

Indeed, tldr. 🫢

This proposal is one I am happy to vote for. Let's finally start this amazing chain growing!

Awesome, thankyou - let's go!

>If there is a straightforward and logical solution here, it seems to be to increase the userbase of Hive and to increase demand and trading volume for the token.

One of the biggest issues in this regard is that 99% of the apps on hive are costing us money and pushing down the token price. If we can get Hive up to $5 you can bet that people will be queuing up for accounts.

The last run up we had was caused by splinterlands going viral and people paying $10 a piece for spellbooks. The team had to buy hive off the markets to create enough accounts and to fund resource credits for everybody. Actual revenue brought into the eco-system.

We need to see apps like peakd generating revenue and buying hive off the market with external funds form ads or other sources. If there is no money buying the token from the markets we are just going to keep leaking.

Inleo have started this process so it will be interesting to see how it performs over the next year but every app should be able to fund their running costs in the long run. It's fine to get funded to start and help get set up but over time they need to start paying their own way and even bringing money back into the system.

To be fair apart from the hivewatchers proposal most of the ones funded right now are adding to our overall infrastructure and beneficial to the eco-system but we need more of a business mindset from the apps.

The exchanges are a problem and always have been but if we can grow the value of hive large enough and it's associated projects then i think that it will ease the burden of persuasion needed to get listings. Crim does wonders for the chain but we probably need a specific group of people charged with guiding the chain, answering queries and running a concentrated marketing campaign.

It doesn't take huge money to get noticed but it does take hard work and creativity.

• Core group of verified users to become a focus point for growth.
• Apps to work towards generating revenue from whatever sources possible.
• A strong and concentrated marketing campaign to bring in more users.
• Light accounts for users to join more easily.
• Shared resources for apps to build on the chain.
• A hub for people to get information and share ideas and projects.
• A legal entity to take responsibility for necessary paperwork.
• Generate more volume organically from projects buying hive from the markets.

Basically get a group of the most knowledgeable and hardworking users that are willing to create a three year plan and have the ability to execute it.

A proper roadmap for growth and get buy in from the different apps and projects on chain to implement it. Too many projects are wasting time building the same things instead of making better use of our resources by building it one and sharing it to everybody.

We don't need five types of lite account. We need one type for five projects.

That frees up the other four dev teams to build four other pieces of infrastructure that other will also need and speed up development by 5x. Just as one example.

I've been on hive for 7 years and it's still a nightmare to open an account. A problem that we've been talking about since day one. It's better now but still not simple and quick enough.

If the apps are good enough then we can market them separately as great projects for anybody to join and focus on each one as a stand alone project that can be a gateway to hive and the wider eco-system.

Thanks for your detailed comments.

In general I agree with you. You may have seen my recent post (Ura-Soul) on my experience with trying to sign up a friend to Hive - it didn't go well.

On the one hand, some of these issues can be resolved by a type of more centralized collaboration, but simultaneously the projects are individually funded/run and are to some extent competing with each other. I think that the DHF is the obvious savior of this situation in that proposals can be generated that are intended to provide high quality services/code to all dApp operators in ways that can raise the bar of the UX of hive in general.

This way the dApps only really need to collaborate in so far as adding their DHF vote to support the proposals in question, but at the same time the burden is lifted on them to achieve shared goals. In some cases, some dApps have already invested into solving some problems, such as the creation of lite accounts, so it might be more on their shoulders to make those solutions more widely available. Again, though, that is a good use case for the DHF too.

The development of the DHF to include some kind of 'job offers' site to the wider world would also help a lot. That way the community can define work that needs to be done, vote on it and then potentially effectively tender it out to the wider world - possibly then voting on who should receive the contract. This requires some substantial development, but is something I have already heard key stakeholders discussing the need for. Yet again, this is another ideal use case for the DHF itself.

The Strategizer proposal is geared up to try to nudge the situation on Hive towards solutions for all of these issues.. We will fit in as much as we can!

>Light accounts for users to join more easily.

HIVE now has Resource Credits delegation, exactly to solve the account creation problem.

I have given you my opinion on this before if I recall correctly.
You can do this, and its all well thought out and well meaning but...
No info provided through this guarantees any action by those that should utilize this information.

What you are essentially doing with this is trying to teach, those that dont yet know how to crawl, how to fly an airplane.

[IMAGE: https://media.tenor.com/QyvnFwjGNWYAAAAC/maximalerschub-a340.gif]

Ill be completely honest. I prefer "yelling" at our frontend devs for not doing the bare minimum, free stuff, over putting this type of effort behind a proposal like this.

@crimsonclad set a good precedent on how things should be done lately with Hiveblocks on Twitter.
Making dapp founders look bad in comparison to what an unpaid volunteer that runs no Hive dapps is doing, I always consider a better encouragement than a well researched strategy recommendation.

One has the power of emotional and ego appeal. A marketing strategy recommendation they can just ignore.

Just my thoughts. I wish you all the luck though.

Thanks for your comment. I can see where you are coming from, but at the same time I think it's a bit harsh to suggest that dApp operators are incapable of understanding how to run their project in ways that lead to growth - even with significant help.

If Hive's whales mostly want businesses to grow on Hive and to bring money in to the system instead of it constantly leaving, then there's no way around the fact that the projects need to become as directed towards growth as possible - which requires access to good data.

The proposal here is intended to advise everyone on Hive, including the people who vote for proposals, so that there is some way to understand whether projects are heading in helpful directions.

It's definitely true that dApps can all ignore everything that is discovered/shared, but I'd be pretty surprised if they did that. I spoke to several of the big dApp operators before writing the proposal and they all said essentially the same thing, that they really need something like this proposal in order to help their own strategy.

As with the Ignite proposal and other marketing proposals, there is no way to know whether the results will be powerful or not, without going ahead and trying it. I had expected that Ignite would produce research and reports of the kind I am suggesting here, but (partially) since they didn't we are still mostly in the dark as to how to navigate this situation.

We are due - this year (allegedly) - to see substantial improvements to Hive's feature set, so now is the perfect time to be laying a foundation for growth based on real world data. :)

The shame game is a dead end IMO.

The fact of the matter is that most devs do not know marketing. Similar to how most marketers don't know development. You can yell at a bunch of entrepreneurial marketers all you want about refactoring a database, and it will never get done. Conversely, shout all you want at devs to get their marketing going, and it's not going to happen.

Sure, you get some unicorns out there who can do both. It's RARE and it's energy sapping to be burning both ends like that.

Rather than rely on unicorns, any competent centralized org would have their dev team do dev stuff and their marketing team do marketing stuff, with a management layer to coordinate the output.

Obviously Hive isn't that, so we need to come up with our own approach. I see this @strategizer proposal as a way for the marketing minds of Hive to rally around something they can start to add value to, rather that standing around hoping that devs will do it/lead it. Once pieces of this start to crystallize, folks that are unicorns, folks that know how to communicate between dev/marketing, or even devs who know some marketing but won't spend cycles on the 'tough stuff' can begin to use the output.

> No info provided through this guarantees any action by those that should utilize this information.

The information is still critical though. A further step, I agree, is a plan to action it. (Aka hire pilots.) Just because there's a risk that the info won't be leveraged to it max potential isn't an excuse to not do it at all.

Thankyou for the intelligent rebuttal! 😁

We agree completely, it is unreasonable to expect teams that are not optimized for marketing and often limited for resources to be able to excel at both marketing and development of cutting edge technology.

Some of the proposals for dApps that are already funded do direct some funds towards marketing, so we need to take steps to try to prevent duplication of effort. However, I am not aware of any of the projects intending to carry out the kind of research that we intend for Strategizer, so they should all be able to benefit in ways that help them to optimize their existing plans.

Cheers!

> direct some funds towards marketing

I suspect most "marketing plans" are "let's put some words out there on X and see what happens (if we remember)" or "make Hive posts." The latter is cool if your Total Addressable Market is Hive users. That's not a really sustainable TAM though, especially if nothing is being done to grow Hive itself.

The former is just... not typically effective. Unless you're hammering it all day, every day, doing non-scalable work like crim or anomadsoul do to get into Spaces, learning the algo, networking, designing smart conversion funnels ('cause all Twitter is TOFU marketing, and all apps (including dApps) need the full funnel)... and we know that is pulling teeth to get projects to begrudgingly author one half-decent tweet a week (which is like going to the gym for 5 minutes a week and hoping to see results).

> However, I am not aware of any of the projects intending to carry out the kind of research that we intend for Strategizer

Me neither! I've earmarked and advocated for market research for WOO (I believe @bookerman is happy to share our general content marketing plan publicly, if anyone is interested. I'll check with him again to be sure if anyone requests though), but it's not cheap and we're pretty bootstrapped as it is.

I'm stuck and can't decide.

"Hive Census." Please correct me if I'm wrong or explain the procedure. I envision a questionnaire sitting in a quiet corner of the chain somewhere collecting dust and very few actually taking the time to fill it out accurately and honestly. Majority won't even know it exists and if they do find it or it finds them, statistically speaking, when presented with these surveys, 70% of people ignore them. AI gave me that "fact" and from my personal experience I can tell you I ignore them 100% of the time. For instance, if Peakd provided me with a popup (similar to claiming rewards in the bottom right corner) "Please fill out this survey," I'd most likely click the x to get rid of the "annoying" popup.

I've a few more concerns but I didn't come here to rip this apart or complain.

In a response here you said:

> I spoke to several of the big dApp operators before writing the proposal and they all said essentially the same thing, that they really need something like this proposal in order to help their own strategy.

Perhaps once I see more of them actually supporting this proposal, I'll feel comfortable backing them up with a vote of my own. For now I'm sitting on the fence seeing a high price tag, wondering who would actually buy this or needs this.

This seems to target the entirety of Hive. Consumers of games as example would have different wants and needs than consumers of social platforms, and those here for financial aspects would see things differently as well. So I'm not sure how it all gels.

Thanks for your comments and questions.

The response rate of surveys varies with the context and audiences involved to some extent. In this case there is a need to take a multi-dimensional approach to gaining people's attention and motivating them to respond. This is a little different to a typical situation where a business wants to gather information in order to improve its ability to extract even more money from its customers!

This is an area that will be somewhat experimental, but we envision a combination of outreach to communities, including posting off-chain into relevant Discord servers, and the correct motivational/educational language may be sufficient to generate enough responses. I think people's opinions on Hive are one of the most commonly expressed themes on this network, so I know that many people are already motivated to respond 😄.

We also have the option of motivating verified respondents with small upvotes from a large account, but that is not ideal due to the increased motive that smaller users will then have to reply with multiple accounts and to skew the data. Ultimately, we can't KYC every respondent and we have to accept that as with all such surveys there will be a degree of manipulation and inaccuracy involved. We have plans on how to minimize this concern but we are also flexible and open to input from the community as we continue.

It's likely that we will be involved in the next town hall to discuss the proposal, so that will be an opportunity for people to give their thoughts on this area and what is or is not acceptable to them in terms of how best to proceed. I think that our existing plans will generate useful data but it's certainly possible that our approach can be improved by input from Hive's many geniuses!

The various categories of dApps on Hive will need to be taken into consideration, yes. Some areas of research will focus on topics that apply to everyone and some will be category specific.

In terms of dApp operators voting for the proposal, I can see 7 of them already in the voting list and I have received feedback already from others that they support the proposal, so I hope to see their votes soon too. By all means wait before voting, the project is due to go live on Monday, so I will be very active between now and then to gain as much support as possible.

This is a pure strategy proposal, not an execution proposal. This should be made clear. But that is not to say that strategy is not valuable on its own.

Decentralized social blogging solutions are not our competitors. Before we get started we need to identify who the real competitors are. Hive was originally based on code that came from a chain that was designed to support one social function. That was 4 years ago. Now, Hive is the chain to build on due to its data storage ability, social settings, zero fees, OBI, layers, and so on. Our real competitors are other blockchains that offer great building opportunities.

SEO: Do you mean to go through the dapps and offer them SEO insight? If so, some of these dapps have proposals that include budgets which are presumably for this. How can we evaluate the service to each dapp so we can equalize the budgets in an accountable manner? (Meaning, the same service isn't paid for twice). Each dapp should consent likely. It would be good to gauge consent rates early.

Polling: The biggest challenge in getting the sentiments on Hive experiences, communities and the DHF will be the fact that people who are prominent in contributing feedback will keep doing that and everyone else who quietly creates content will not be reached. The majority of all users will need to be polled. This challenge has to be considered as without a high % sample size of active users, there is no point in getting feedback as we all already know what select people who on their own initiative put in feedback will say. The methodology of obtaining feedback in a way that its inclusive of as many active users as possible is required.

Listings should not be a part of any of this discussion. Those are business relationships and they are done a specific way. There is no need to take what can be a good approach to planning and shoot it in the foot with involving listings.

Thanks for your comments.

> This is a pure strategy proposal, not an execution proposal. This should be made clear.

We did try to highlight this in a few places, yes, such as:

"This initial proposal is only for research and strategy, not for implementation of any potentially more costly marketing activities, such as advertising campaigns."

> Decentralized social blogging solutions are not our competitors.

I think it's fair to say that Hive fits the description of a decentralized social network, despite the ambitions to be much more. There is certainly sense to expanding the view of Hive to include it within other categories too, but in its current stage of development it is logical to see other decentralised social networks as being among its competitors.

Perhaps the community will disagree, but it seems something of a gamble to try to market Hive as, for example, a competitor to to Ethereum's EVM at this point, given that we do not have the necessary functionality in place. When/if general smart contracts do go live on Hive then the shape of Hive may change drastically and so will the approach to growth and marketing. Some of the building related features have been present all along and as a developer I will say that the lack of quality development documentation is massively limiting Hive's appeal in that arena.

The question of 'why people should come to Hive' should ideally be taking into consideration public opinion, rather than relying so much on the opinion of those already invested in Hive - including my own opinion. We might disagree on the currently best selling points of Hive, but none of that matters if no-one else agrees with either of us!
I feel it is invaluable to understand what the market itself values and wants. In any case, the idea of this project is to include all potentialities in order to get as wide an understanding as possible of the options, strengths and weaknesses that relate to Hive's growth.. So that will absolutely include assessment of the issues relating to developers and entrepreneurs.

SEO:

I am aware that SEO is a contentious subject in general and also that, as you point out, there are some projects who already receive funding in that area. I don't currently have a list of which projects that includes, but I will find out. From what I have seen, there may be some issues that are limiting the performance of Hive sites due to the overall design of Hive as a decentralised eco-system (content duplication, among others). There are also possible strategies that most sites could use, but which they probably don't as yet. There will also be more specific issues that relate to individual domains.

SEO was not intended to be a primary focus of this project, so it will probably be handled near the end. I will ideally set aside time to first identify common weaknesses and opportunities that all sites can benefit from and then dedicate whatever time is available to provide suggestions to sites that are receptive.

Some people are avidly pro SEO and some are avidly anti SEO, for their own reasons. It makes not sense to waste time trying to help a project that doesn't want the help or intend to act on it, so we won't do that. If it turns out that the general consensus is that we should skip SEO then that's totally fine as we have more than enough other goals here that we will be kept busy regardless.

I am currently gradually speaking to the various dApp operators, but it understandably takes some time.

Polling:

As mentioned in our lengthy private discussion earlier, there are a couple of main challenges with the surveys. One is that the surveys need to both be able to support anonymity, while also being tied to Hive accounts to help minimize manipulation via multiple accounts.

We are able to use survey systems that are privacy oriented and then potentially implement a simple system to confirm with the users on-chain that they did indeed complete the survey. We can then transparently publish the account names on-chain, without publicly linking the names to their actual responses. Those accounts can then be scrutinized by vested stakeholders, perhaps including reference to blacklists published on Hive, in order to try to minimize abuse by known 'problem' accounts on Hive.

There is no simple solution to all of this unfortunately, but this is also a common problem with surveys in general, so it's generally accepted that there is always a potential for some inaccuracy and misinformation among the results. The goal is, as you alluded to, to receive a high enough volume of responses that the signal outweighs the noise.

As previously mentioned privately, we will do our best to inform the community both on-chain and off-chain (in chat spaces, for example) that the census is underway and that community members have an opportunity to express their opinions and experiences in order to help improve Hive. One of the main subjects I have seen discussed here over the years is this exact one - how to improve Hive and what the problems are with it... So I don't expect there to be a shortage of respondents!

It is not out of the question to organize incentives for participation too - though that needs to be minimized in order to reduce the incentive to try to game the system, skewing the results in the process.

Listings:

Exchange relations and listings were never intended to be part of this proposal. We may ask general questions about people's views regarding crypto, which may possibly generally relate to the concept of exchanges and also to De-Fi, but are more than happy to check with you and @crimsonclad in advance to ensure that you don't think anything we do will cause you problems.

> Perhaps the community will disagree, but it seems something of a gamble to try to market Hive as, for example, a competitor to to Ethereum's EVM at this point, given that we do not have the necessary functionality in place.

Yes, we need to be careful about over-selling.

With that said, we should be judiciously but aggressively spending DHF funds to put that "necessary functionality in place."

Yes, we fully supportive of efforts to introduce general smart contracts to Hive, that's easily the most necessary - but missing - feature imo.

> Our real competitors are other blockchains that offer great building opportunities.

👆 YES!

We need to build a Field of Dreams specifically for builders of Fields of Dreams.

We need to make Hive the go-to platform for existing and aspiring #web3 developers.

To accomplish that, we need very clear and easily-accessible tools, libraries, tutorials, tutorial videos, and perhaps even our own IDE and dev help desk.

[IMAGE: https://media.tenor.com/SE4MSM3NiPoAAAAC/fieldofdreams-ifyoubuildit.gif]

Also just gonna drop this here: https://www.focus.xyz/

$78M worth of $DESO token reserved so far. Whitepaper's plan for onboarding web2 is fascinating (get your web2 socials evaluated and paid out in staked $FOCUS immediately upon association, earn a % of referred accounts that join).

One of those fun "But Hive..." claims, re: their veryvery innovative 1/10,000th of a penny transactions:

> This means that Focus can pioneer innovative monetization and content mechanics that are not possible with older high-fee blockchains or slower and heavily-censored fiat payment rails.

One takeaway: fast and feeless is still a marketable term, assuming this project did its research.

Another: Maybe this is a flash in the pan dApp or rug, sure. But if it ain't stuff like this will eclipse us fast.

Would be interesting to compare wallet holdings vs:

[IMAGE: https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/jfuji/23tcP5UHDsFyiFbm6VUNwVhpuDrjhYdER75mixu5KhndGGwyUpfz7hvJhZV5VoGWd7Qq5.png]

1 $DESO = ~108 $HIVE right now.
So how many wallets hold more than 108 $HIVE?
Would be curious to see.

I'm voting for the proposal because I think we need more people involved in this and such research will be beneficial for the whole ecosystem. However, I cannot agree with everything in the post as I feel there are a couple of invalid statements and planned actions that do not bring much value, like research for DHF feedback. I do not believe it will change anything in how and who votes for the proposals. I can write more later on if necessary.

Thanks for your vote and comments!
The DHF part is really a secondary add-on that fits the goal we have of optimizing Hive to become more attractive to end-users, developers and investors. Ultimately, the DHF is the most effective tool we have to enhance and grow Hive overall and other similar projects make their DAO the focal point of their entire project. It seems logical to me to investigate how this key selling point of the Hive system can be improved. I know for 100% certain that poor tracking/accountability is a major turn off to investors when it comes to spending of funds (including DAOs).

However, I also set the intention that this project would be as data driven as possible, rather than driven by my own opinion (or any individual's opinion) - so which specific tasks would be undertaken, including any related to the DHF, will be finalised once the initial data collection and analysis is done. That way, any actions that we plan that go beyond market research will be backed by real world data.

Optimising the DHF is not an easy thing to do, which is why this proposal really only makes mention of it in terms of research and we would not be putting a lot of time into that area regardless of what the data says.

so great post with so many details i belivied no dubt
keep this way have a nice day!
!BBH

@strategizer! Your Content Is Awesome so I just sent 1 $BBH (Bitcoin Backed Hive) to your account on behalf of @pirulito.zoado. (2/5)

Voted with my proxy.

Thankyou!

Do we have a means to find samples of past users of Hive/Steem who have left over the years for surveys? Or even people who landed on sign up pages but did not complete the process. IMO that is a crucial element, because only surveying those who successfully signed up and then have stuck around is going to have major survivorship bias (which I find to be a big limitation in my own ability to analyse these issues primarily based on the data on the chain itself).

An alternative approach to surveys if we can't find sufficient people for samples (eg. if one person in 10,000 is even aware of Hive/Steem at all) would be some kind of focus testing, eg. getting people to attempt to sign up and use Hive and see what their experience is.

On the matter of social media vs blockchain platform, it is a fact that at one point in the past Steem was indeed quite successful as a social platform, with steemit.com reaching the top 100 websites in South Korea by traffic. We can't even say with reasonable certainty - why was it initially successful and why did that success so quickly disappear?

Thanks for your input. To my knowledge, there is no reliable way of tracking users once they leave Hive. In the mainstream world this is often done by tracking cookies, email and other related options. We don't have any of that on Hive as a general rule - though some UIs do collect Email addresses. We do not have access to any data that can track users beyond that, which is by design and really is a selling point.

This obviously poses a significant challenge when it comes to marketing and user retention, since the majority of mainstream strategies fail immediately as a result.

The only way we can capture data on users that don't sign up after landing on the landing pages, who get stuck or who don't come back is to provide extremely clear and user friendly feedback systems that feed into a central repository of data that everyone can access. I very rarely see anything like that anywhere online, since it is mostly commercial businesses that are motivated to optimise their UX to that extent and they don't make such results public. So we need to develop a unified system to handle this. Exploring this and finding solutions is ideally going to be a small part of this proposal.

There are good systems that can be installed by dApp operators which will record all of the user's movements and can even allow them to record realtime audio commentary as they use the site (the system makes it simple for analysts to then review the recordings efficiently later on). These can be opted-into in order to protect privacy. This is a necessary step towards UX improvements in a growing system in today's climate.

Focus groups could be organised by running a custom Ecency instance and installing the user tracking software I mentioned, so there's no need to get agreement from dApp operators for that to work - but we still need to isolate and source the audience/users for that process to work in a meaningful way.

In terms of finding sufficient survey respondents, the questions would be designed in ways that enable us to collect data whether people know about Steem/Hive or not. There would be questions for people who do already know about Hive, but it is likely that targeting people who know about Hive but who don't use it, will be costly. Also, from my own experience, it's clear to me that the vast majority of people who do know about Hive but who don't use it, have big misunderstandings about it due to 'errors' that constantly get published by 'journalists' on the topic.

We are flexible and would likely change our approach based on initial survey findings, but at this point I imagine we will mainly frame questions in ways that gather the needed data without needing the outside individuals to have much knowledge of Hive. We may have success in finding people who really know about Hive but who don't use it, but we can't know if this will be a sufficient number without starting the process.

I am not aware of any market research ever being published in the entire history of either Steem or Hive, so yes, we have no reliable info on the growth of Steem or its failing - beyond our own observations and experiences. I have a few theories and some parts are fairly obvious, but I do know that it has always been hard to get anyone to use Hive/Steem if I approach them on web 2, even people I know well and who would like Hive! This has been challenging to understand, but in my circles the reasons for not using Hive or leaving quickly almost always include one or more of:

• Don't have time / too difficult to learn.
• Audience too small, not worth it.
• Crypto is a scam.
• It's not really uncensored, it's just a facade designed to look like it is, but really it's just a different form of the information control we see on web 2.

In terms of why Steem was so successful, I personally think that it's a combination of:

• First mover advantage (novelty).
• The COMMUNITY of users who were often anarcho capitalists and visionary thinkers - creating interesting discussion and opportunity.
• A spirit of creativity and openness.

At this point, so few people have heard of Steem or Hive (allowing DeSo to literally lie and claim that they are the first decentralised social network), that Hive kind of still has a first mover advantage if it were to apply the right strategy to exploit its position.

The creative anarcho minds have mostly left Hive at this point, frustrated with the policies that were put in place at its inception. I know some of them and they are planning to launch competitors to Hive themselves in some cases.

It's difficult to quantify accurately how all of these factors directly impact growth in an ever changing global landscape, but I don't think its impossible to repeat or exceed Steemit's success - however, imo, stakeholders need to understand the world audience much better than at present.

If there is one thing I would like to see changed about the way we do things as a community, is to move towards making decisions based on data. No one person is driving decisions so I can't assume that will happen, but I look forward to us at least having more data available to make it possible.

100% yes! Sailing blind is not recommended!