Honey whaleā¦ but before going any further, I just want to say that this is my opinion, itās not trading or financial advice, make your own judgements, make your own model. Iām obviously biased, not just because Iām a whale, but also because I have invested time and energy into 1hive for years and Iām excited and passionate about its future. Iām planning to be here working regardless of what happens with price, but there isnāt a core team, there was no ICO, and nobody has any obligation to continue contributing 1hive.
The Honey chart is not very fun to look at right now.
People in the community are understandably unneasy, people are ascribing all sort of reasons to price movements from technical analysis, too much honey in farms, too little honey in farms, honey in the wrong farms, geo-political macro trends, correlation or (inverse-correlation) to other factors like BTC or Ethereum gas fees, and letās not forget the ever popular theory that the ādevsā are evil and out to get you.
The reality is that on a short time horizon, trying to predict cryptocurrency price movements is closer to gambling than to investment. Itās fine to gamble, but keep in mind thats what it is.
If you want to trade a crypto asset like Honey over a longer term time horizon, itās important to think about lots of factors, create a thesis and a model of where the asset is in terms of adoption, what its potential value might end up being in the future, and how likely it is to get there. You can use that model to determine what the value of the asset is to you, and how it fits into your overall financial portfolio, and then act accordingly. If your model says the current price is too high sell, if too low buy.
It is early
Being in the 1hive community right now, is like being in bitcoin in 2011.
Honey has existed for some time, if youāve joined the community in the last 8 weeks you have joined at the same time as thousands of other people. We went from ~100 token holders to over 10000, the price of honey rose from ~50 dollars to a peak of ~1400 dollars. Itās now at the time of writing this at ~480. I canāt tell you what the price will be tomorrow, or next week, but can tell you that its highly unlikely to be straight up or straight down, because it never is. This rapid growth comes with lots of challenges, social, political, financial.
Most responsible people that experience a 28x increase in value for something they hold, are probably looking to rebalance their portfolio to some degree, even if they still believe strongly in the growth potential of the asset. The entire supply of honey was circulating among contributors, before the influx, tons of people are in that position. That means there is a ton of sell pressure. There is also a ton of new people joining the community that see a ton of growth potential for 1hive and honey. Massive growth spikes, create these imbalances between existing holders and new entrants, and it takes time for the market to stabilize.
Here is an example of a similar event in bitcoins historical charts. From April to June bitcoin rose ~30x in 2011, followed by a dramatic drop before stabilizing and starting increase again.
If you zoom out, this market cycle doesnāt even register.
Weak hands
Of course, maybe Honey isnāt the next bitcoin, maybe we peaked, maybe we wonāt ever see another all time high.
I hope everyone who feels that way, goes to honeyswap right now and sells all their honey. If thats you and your right, the sooner that you exit the better off youāll be, and while I disagree, Iād much rather have you put that Honey in the hands of someone who has a bit more vision, a bit more conviction, and is ready to strap in for an epic roller coaster ride.
Iām far more bullish on a community where every weak hand in the bunch has been shaken out (regardless of the price) and everyone still holding is aligned around a vision of shared value creation that far exceeds the current value, than one where the market value is high but everyone in the community feels like the price is āsoftā and not sure if they should hold or sell. So if youāre nervous, if youāre unsure, if youāre on the fence go sell, please.
A thesis
My thesis on crypto currencies is that their value is driven primarily by communities and not by technologies.
Technology may seem important, but what really matters is the community that forms around it, the meme, the idea, the history, the culture. Bitcoin isnāt valuable because its codebase is the best, most secure, most scalable solution on the market. Itās valuable because of its origin story, its distribution, its history, and the āhard moneyā meme.
The actual technology is basically antiquated at this point, it doesnāt scale well, (on layer one or native layer 2), its got an economic policy that is likely unsustainable to secure its base layer (transaction fees may never be enough to cover miner costs as the block reward decreases over time), its being bridged to ethereum where it may never need to be bridged back for settlement (exacerbating the problem). At some point either the supply policy will need to change to increase security, or the notion that the bitcoin ledger even needs to exist when you can just migrate the balances to Ethereum and use that as a settlement layer (while keeping the hard money meme) will be an interesting challenge for the Bitcoin community in the future. but Iām still bullish on Bitcoin.
The point here is that Bitcoin isnāt valuable because of its technology, its valuable because of its community. People know bitcoin as the first of its kind, it has an amazing origin story, its innovative, it formed a grass roots community over years.
Bitcoin meetups have been happening all across the globe for over a decade and across all sorts of online forums, people share ideas, they propagate culture, and they reinforce the idea that bitcoin is sound money, that itās digital gold, that it will change the world and make it better. Individuals in the bitcoin community contribute not just because they are bitcoin whales, but because they share a common vision. They are missionaries, not mercenaries. Theyāve built exchanges, and companies, and open source code on the edges of the Bitcoin network.
We are trying to create that culture in 1hive, and Iāve already seen in forming. Itās inspiring and amazing and Iām excited for the future of this community.
Honey is money, like Bitcoin is money. But honey isnāt just a copy pasta of the Bitcoin code base like so many before it, like Ethereum itās taking some of the concepts and innovating.
What if instead of only incentivizing miners through issuance and block reward, we had a more general protocol where issuance could be distributed for a broad range of contributions?
Itās a known and well acknowledged problem that both Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer, (see vitaliks post on credible neutrality as one example), that to achieve social scalability we need governance minimization and credible neutral mechanism for incentivizing contributionā¦ but most of these mechanisms have so far been highly specialized and only able to incentivize a small subset of the behaviors that matter most. Proof of Work and Proof of Stake incentivize block producers, but fail to incentivize application layer builders, base layer developers, community educators, marketers, or provide a means to onboard the next million users to the ecosystem. Conviction Voting allows the community to incentivizes arbitrary contributions while keeping automation at the center and humans at the edges.
What we are doing with conviction voting at 1hive is a game changer. Honey will become better money than Bitcoin because it doesnāt just create a āstore of valueā, but is designed to recirculate that value within an economy, and continuously reinvest in itself across a broad range of contributions (development, marketing, support, engineering, whatever is needed most). Itās like the difference between narrow AI and AGI. 1hive is decentralized like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but also has the flexibility to adapt and evolve encoded directly in the protocol.
Many people associate 1hive and honey with just honeyswap, they see it as a fast fork on a side chainā¦ it was a hackathon project that took off organically. We are so much more than just a dex on xdai. We are a community of builders, and honeyswap just happened to be something we needed to build on xdai to make it more useful. We will keep building and growing the Honey economy, Honeyswap is just one chapter in a novel that we are all writing together.
We are all 1hive
Many people have joined the 1hive community over the past months.
Many of them came into it with every intention of getting honey from the faucet and immediately dumping, but many have said that as they dug deeper into the community, they went down the rabbit hole, and found something that was more interesting, more compelling, and truly in the spirit of decentralization. Many have said that the energy of community has made them want to stick around and get excited about crypto all over again. Others have mentioned that 1hive is their very first experience with crypto, they are coming from outside the bubble and getting sucked into the hive. I canāt think of anything more bullish than that.
Everyone one of these people is a part of 1hive, they can influence the direction and the success of the community through their actions. This might be the simple act of sharing their experience and excitement with a friend, or it could be getting involved in a swarm, submitting a proposal, and directly influencing the direction of resources within the community.
When people show up and say that they need the ādevsā to step up, they donāt get that there is no core team, there is only the community. With true decentralization you have the power to shape the community and help it succeed, but you also canāt expect a core team to put up with your bullshit or act like your employee just cause you happen to hold honeyā¦ there isnāt a core team, nobody took your money in an ICO, and nobody has the obligation to do anything for you.
If you want something to change you can step up, build support, and make it happen. The recent proposal to top up the faucet passed with just 191 honey, less than 1% of the total supply of honey.
You also donāt need permission to submit a PR, or to compose a tweet storm, or add a suggestion to improve the community to the forum, you can just do it. The honeyswap twitter account was started by a community member, and is close to having more followers than the 1hiveorg twitter account that I run.
P.S. the is on the horizon