... we might have a bigger bag to worry about: Upbit.
When I curated this morning, I came across the piece of news that Bitshares was delisted from Binance. Ok, things are changing on Binance, and I've been keeping a close eye on them too.
But maybe we miss a more important aspect for us, just because Binance as a whole is huge and influential.
Let's take a look at HIVE on exchanges, thanks to the daily financial charts of @arcange:
What you see at the bottom with a yellow-orange color is Binance. A relatively constant amount of liquid HIVE there, close to 30m.
What you see at the top with the sky-blue color is Upbit, which now holds approximately 120m liquid HIVE and has kept growing its massive custodial holdings. That's more or less 4x the HIVE liquidity on Binance.
The total liquid HIVE is 39% * 417m = 162.6m HIVE as we can deduct from the following information, with approximative calculations:
That means that only a couple of million HIVE is held liquid on-chain by other accounts, except exchanges, and excluding @hive.fund.
If this kind of information is accurate - and I don't see why it wouldn't be - and knowing people outside Korea can't have accounts on that exchange, that liquidity and pairs pose a higher potential threat on Hive than the 30m on Binance. And while we don't know who owns the liquid HIVE on Binance, and I assume they won't attempt to pull another stunt on us using customer funds, on Upbit things are also very unclear as to the intentions of the HIVE holders there, other than using them for pump and dumps, which by itself can be a bad thing for Hive.
If we were to treat the Upbit stake as a whole - which normally is the wrong thing to do when we talk about custodial funds - 120m HIVE represents 28.77% of the HIVE's entire supply, which may be too much, no matter how you take it.
We are generally pleased that our whales are not too big (even when we say they earn too many rewards, lol) and none of them holds too much power over the chain, as St**mit did. But do we know if there isn't a huge whale amassing HIVE on Upbit? We don't, and other than the exchange team, probably nobody does unless that whale wanted someone to know.
Sure, if that whale wants to use that power on-chain, we'd have 30 days (during which it has no governance power) to see what's going on and, maybe, take some action. But it can still manipulate the price of the coin, and we have seen that intensely on Upbit in the past, but maybe not as much lately.
The Bitcoin-Hive bridge built on VSC cannot come sooner, but... we need to keep in mind those bridge nodes will be required to hold double the maximum transaction they can process as collateral. That's a great safety measure, but there will probably be a few nodes that can afford to lock up a huge collateral.
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It's a tough world. I would hope that we would have another CE outside of Upbit because most of us are gated out of that. I don't know if anyone would trust Upbit holding all that Hive for them though.
That's a very good point.
Who would do that and why? What if Upbit is gone tomorrow? Is that only speculative funds? That's a lot... Although, if I know well, Koreans like to gamble...
I haven't really heard of Upbit until now. That is a very large amount of Hive. But thinking about it realistically, it is expected for exchanges to have a large amount. It does dwarf Binance, but that just shows how much Hive owners there are in Upbit. We have a lot of Hive whales, and I don't want to believe that there is only one owner of that Hive in Upbit that dwarfs them. It is illogical, and they are losing out on the different rewards of holding it in a wallet.
A regular user would keep a token on an exchange (more often on a DEX than a CEX nowadays) for speculation purposes. A whale may keep large liquidities on an exchange for different reasons:
Regarding Upbit, in particular, the major issue with it is it isn't open globally. I and you cannot create accounts there. I imagine Blocktrades can't either, directly, although maybe for whales different rules may apply than the ones listed on the site (for example, they can create a Korean company to invest for them on Upbit; or use a Korean citizen proxy, if they are trustful).
Anyway, assuming it's for Koreans only (which I'm starting to doubt seriously) and even if it's also a hidden place for whales, that's kind of worrisome. For once, in the open, most of our HIVE is in the US and Europe, so 28.77% being on Upbit makes you wonder how is that distributed and if there is a hidden agenda behind it. Then, we no longer have a big Korean community on Hive and we parted ways on kind of bad terms. Most of that community remained on the old chain. Should we make any assumptions based on that or not?
That is an interesting way of looking at it. But I doubt a single person or group will invest this amount of money just to target Hive. Why would they risk their investment just to make the token collapse. I'm hoping they just see Hive as very undervalued and Koreans are accumulating for the increase.
Could be. But then they are speculators and at some point, they will sell. And the higher their HIVE holdings, the higher the selloff impact, when they take profit.
Very interesting post and yes this has been a concern for all of us and just look how Huobi (HTX) has shrunk in volume in just 2 years. We do need more exchanges even though another alternative solution is available.
Yes, I noticed. I think Huobi ran into some issues. It was sold to JS during the bear market. And now, JS ran with it into another scandal. While he normally loves scandals, I believe he doesn't want this kind of publicity now, with his friend CZ going down.
I was even thinking that Binance will have the highest numbers of Hive
Seeing this right here is a lot
Upbit is the real deal
For liquid HIVE holdings, yes. Otherwise, Binance is still the top dog in the CEXes world, by far.
Hi @gadrian this is an interesting post with good charts very colorful too. From what I'm reading it sounds like liquid Hive on Binance isn't good correct. The amount on Upbit of liquid Hive is more. So this is dangerous? Right. Could you explain what could happen it got too big on theses platforms Binance and Upbit? Thanks. Barb 😊 #ctp
Since there is so much liquidity on the two exchanges, we depend a lot on what happens there and if HIVE will have issues on either of them. On top of that, Upbit is a relatively closed exchange, only Korean citizens can make an account there.
OK @gadrian thank you.
Thanks for sharing this.
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One thing I am so sure of is that Binance will definitely bounce back from this hard time they are facing. It is just a matter of timr
With both Hive and Bitshares being based on Graphene, more robust links/gateways between the two would be very beneficial adding substantially to the web of input and output avenues.
As one example xBTS can be seen here: https://ex.xbts.io/market/XBTSX.HIVE_BTS For those that have not tried Bitshares, looking at that market is really this simple:
Hive = xBTS.Hive (xBTS is the gateway providing deposit/withdraw services)
BTS = BTS native chain token
Utilizing that gateway will allow you to go from Hive to BTS to endless other options such as smartcoins, stable coins, liquidity pools etc... xBTS also offers Hive.USDT which makes it easy to get on/off chain.
Endless possibilities when blockchains start to work together on common goals.
I'm a big proponent of Hive bridges and have been for a long time. Where we need to be careful is with liquidity. If there's one thing bridges need to be effective (other than security, I mean), it's liquidity. And the more bridges you build, the more liquidity you need for each of them. Right now we have a few bridges either functional or soon to become operational, and neither of them has enough liquidity to support significant volumes and transaction sizes.
Check out the Liquidity pools BTS have come out with: https://docs.bitshares.build/docs/liquidity-pools/liquidity-pools-intro/
The relative ease of creating a bridge on BTS is why I am bullish to connect Hive and BTS more robustly. Both are built on Graphene and would complement each other vs compete.
Yep, the problem remains the same. If there was a BTS/HIVE LP or whatever, you need both BTS and HIVE in that LP to make it deep enough. Probably most people would want to move from BTS to something else, which means an additional step that doesn't exist in the case of a BTC-HIVE bridge or even a BNB-HIVE.
Anyway, from what I know, BTS is supported on Hive-Engine in its wrapped form, as are all or most Graphene-based coins. Having liquidity or volume is a different matter.
It is now the responsibility of all of us that as many new users come to this project then it will be easy to list it on other exchanges then this work will have to be done by all of us.