According to a post I saw earlier, PeakD just shipped something that I’ve been personally wishing for since I first started investing time and energy into Hive: a real “open marketplace” direction that feels native to the chain, and I'm really excited about it.
For the longest time, I kept wondering why we weren’t treating “an online store” as a serious use case for Hive. We already have creators, communities, and a built-in economy. The missing piece was a clean way to turn posts into listings, and make transactions within the platform.
That’s why PeakD’s new “Explorer” subscription caught my eye. Yes, it’s a subscription badge and some perks, but more importantly it’s a live proof-of-concept built on the Hive Open Market protocol created by @borislavzlatanov.
A small subscription… pointing at a bigger future
PeakD is keeping the first experiment almost free: 0.1 HBD per month, created as a recurring transfer that runs for 12 months, with the collected HBD going to the Hive DHF fund.
What matters isn’t the price. What matters is the pattern:
- recurring transfers as subscriptions
- a storefront page on a Hive account
- a protocol others can build on
If this works smoothly, you can already imagine the next steps: subscriptions for creators, memberships for communities, paid access to tools, even digital products that live entirely on-chain.
What “Hive Open Market” actually is
Borislav’s description is spot-on!... products and services can be published on-chain as regular posts, complete with media and comment threads. Frontends can then display an extra “product” section (price, quantity, Buy button). Purchases happen through specially-formatted transfers (or recurrent transfers for subscriptions). Reviews can be tied back to the purchase as linked comments, and escrow is part of the trust model for dealing with unknown sellers.
The best part is that it’s an open protocol, not a walled marketplace. Communities can curate what appears, stakeholders can moderate via voting, and different frontends can integrate it in their own style.
The HBD angle is underrated
A marketplace needs a unit of account that doesn’t whiplash every hour. HBD being relatively stable makes it the obvious choice for pricing goods and services.
And for anyone who understands HBD savings, there’s another layer: the savings APR has been 15% for more than a year now, and withdrawals take three days.
Not financial advice, of course. I’m just saying that Hive has a stablecoin with real on-chain utility, and a marketplace is one of the most natural places for that utility to show up.
Social + shopping is a proven combo
If you look at TikTok, it’s not just “social media” anymore. It’s content plus commerce, and it works because the buying moment happens right after you’ve been entertained or convinced.
That’s the exact mental model I can see forming on Hive.
A Snap or a short post shows a product. People ask questions in the comments. Trust gets built in public. Then the Buy button is right there, priced in HBD, and the buyer can even spend earnings they already made on-chain.
It fits the culture we already have here, the “laughs, chats, and shared ideas” that make Hive feel like home.
My seller dilemma (and why I’m still bullish)
I haven’t listed anything yet because I’m still deciding what I want to sell: artworks, photography, digital packs, or maybe novelty items that only make sense to Hive people.
But seeing Open Market taking shape motivates me, because it’s proof that builders are still building, even when the price trend isn’t exciting. That’s the signal I care about most. When people build in the quiet seasons, they’re usually building for the long game.
If you were to open a Hive shop today, what would you sell?
Hive on.
click here ⏩ City Life Explore TikTok Page 🎦
We already did, several times. We have had Steem shop announced after the first Steemfest called Peerhub. Then we had HiveLists and shop.hivelists.io and then we had Waivio. So I think that this has been around since the beginning of time, and has been highly underused by the community. I was just having a discussion on a guy asking me, why would he spend time opening a shop for hivers if they were so few. Even then I told him that Hivelists not only take Hive but also takes BTC, LN (thanks to v4v) and XMR, USDT on several L2s.
There is quite a different approach used, in my understanding. When looking at previous marketplaces, it became apparent that the idea for how it can work is different. A protocol functions differently from an app.
What if the shop was automatically opened and the time it took was just the time to make a post, would that make a difference?
I dunno, I dont think so honestly. I am talking from a human perspective, also the protocol in Hive isn't evolved enough to take other coins like USDT or BTCLN. I think for commerce you want to have as many payment methods as possible.
For sure, more payment methods are needed. In this case, one way we can enable this is by having bridges, so someone can pay in e.g. USDT and the bridge will convert that to HBD on the fly.
Glad you like it and you're thinking of making use of it. You're already suggesting use cases which I hadn't thought of. I was hoping that would happen, and looks like it happened right away. :) So curious to see where the community might take this.
You bet.
Nice one, an avenue for real purpose. Let's get it on!
Good luck with that, doesn't waivio do the same thing? I really need to take a look at both when I have some time.
!discovery
I do see Hive having potential in this regard, we just need to find a good balance of producers and consumers. Producers being people with interesting things to sell, and consumers being those with genuine interest in the consumption of it. Say good artists on here selling prints. Or a range of decent musicians selling digital albums.
As others have said we've had marketplaces on here for a while, a few different ones even. But the usual problem does fall down to the community being very small and not diverse enough to take advantage of seller tools.
We need to figure out a Shopify/Etsy type of situation where we have both creatives and people wanting to buy from them. A problem we currently face is we lost a lot of creatives over the years because the effort to do their thing + post with unstable rewards discouraged them. Too many people that remain are bloggers which aren't as interested in either creating physical items or purchasing.
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