All that chart shows is that a lot of large and/or mostly dormant accounts aren’t divesting, so their accumulated vests slowly tick upward. The stats that track movement shows regular outflow that outpaces inflow.
After the colluding exchanges finished their power downs, we’re still in net negative vesting week over week.
HIVE is also leaving individual accounts and heading out to exchanges at a greater amount than the reverse, further corroborating the lack of vesting interest.
The first chart below is STEEM, which shows a 4.5-year trend of losing against BTC and a return to lows in Dollar terms. The same trend continues with HIVE in the second chart, once again corroborating a lack of desire to purchase and stake on our proof-of-stake platform. This is problematic.
Given the complete lack of growth and retention on the social media front after 4.5 years, I’m willing to say that being known as a social media blockchain isn’t attracting social media users or crypto investors. There may be many reasons for that, but none of them preclude moving that to the application layer like any other project.
But as I said in the post, this was mostly about what we could do with staking and inflation after we’ve already established that second layer solution for social rewards (or “SMTs”).
It's clear that there is very little interest in staking in the platform. What the comparison between vesting and divesting show is that in general the users of the network are more interested in treating Hive as a faucet. I am not convinced that removing the social layer will change that behaviour. If we do it stakeholders will simply shift from cashing out the curation/author rewards to cashing out their staking rewards.
Now that I say it out loud it sounds very bleak.
Although if we analyze what happens in the crypto world in general is that people buy into narratives. People buy into bitcoin because they believe the narrative that the limited supply makes it a store of value...for instance. So what is our narrative and what do we do to make sure that people that believe it want to participate?
Saying that we are the blockchain for web 3.0 (as it reads on the hive.io website) is not enough. What does that even mean to regular folks? Not much if you ask me. Even the steem.com site has more punch to it (it's a bunch of lies but nonetheless).
One thing is true...we can't sit around and wait.