Flipped: How Hive’s dapp activity overtook Steem in 10 weeks
Justin Sun’s plan appears to have completely backfired
Whatever you think about Steemit’s strategic partnership with TRON Foundation as announced on 14 February 2020, the decision of some users to hard fork Steem to create Hive, has to-date been an unqualified success.
Not only does the Hive cryptocurrency have a higher market cap than Steem, despite only being launched on 20 March — $90 million to $82 million at the time of writing — dapps on the Hive dapp ecosystem already attract more daily activity than those on Steem.
Flipping the switch
The crossover point between the two dapp ecosystems is easy to explain.
Blockchain game Splinterlands, which was the most popular Steem dapp with over 4,500 daily active unique wallets, transitioned from Steem to Hive on 1 June 2020, resulting in those users moving from Steem to Hive.
Simply put, the Steem dapp ecosystem dropped from around 8,000 daily active unique wallets at the end of May to around 3,500 daily active unique wallets overnight.
Conversely, the Hive dapp ecosystem went from around 3,000 to more than 9,000 daily active unique wallets.
But if Splinterlands was the prime mover for this flippening, it isn’t the only dapp that encouraged users to move from Steem to Hive.
Dapp doppelgangers
Of course, because the blockchains are almost exactly the same (just not backward compatible), many dapps are either running on both or have been copied from one to the other.
The most obvious example is Steemit, the blogging platform which created Steem’s user community in the first place (back in 2016), and which via its acquisition provided the opportunity for TRON’s takeover.
Steemit continues to run on Steem, albeit with reduced daily activity; down 15% since March, whereas on Hive, the Peakd and Hive Blog launched. These have quickly grown their audience to the extent all these three blogging dapps now have around 1,500 daily active unique wallets.
Currently, Hive Blog and Steemit are fighting out for the #1 position with Peakd trailing in third. No doubt, many users are using all three dapps at the moment.
It was a similar situation for activity dapp Actifit, at least, in April.
It’s running on Steem and Hive, and during April, activity on the two versions was very similar but during May the Hive version pulled away, now with around 10% more daily users.
In this context, it will be interesting to see what happens to the blogging dapps, especially if one of the two Hive dapps becomes dominant.
Not all Hive dapps have been so successful, though.
While video dapp DTube has seen its Steem audience declining during May, the Hive version doesn’t yet look like it will overtake it.
However, low levels of daily activity on DTube means this small victory doesn’t help Steem in the popularity war against Hive.
If the TRON Foundation still expects to snatch a surprise victory from the jaws of what’s shaping up to be a crushing defeat, it’s going to have to come up with something shiny and new to get Steem users excited.
Otherwise, over the coming months, it looks likely even more of them are going to ditch Steem for Hive as its dapp ecosystem further matures.
TL;DR — You can buy tokens but the community has its own values.
Originally published at https://dappradar.com on June 9, 2020.
