How to Leverage the Hive Ecosystem to Create Endless Opportunities For Financial Freedom

In a recent post, I talked about how Owning Bitcoin is the Path to Financial Freedom. Along that path to financial freedom, there are endless options to also increase your earning power as an individual and drive more wealth creation.

It's been so many years now but when I started getting more deeply entrenched in the crypto space, I learned about a platform called Steem. Today, it's called Hive.

Bitcoin is the path to financial freedom through investment and wealth "stacking". By owning Bitcoin, you're owning digital gold. That digital gold brings you the potential to have your wealth increase exponentially over long time horizons.

Hive offers something very different... It's not digital gold. The strategy here isn't even necessarily to just dollar cost average into Hive and hold it (though that can be a part of a broader macro strategy within the Hive ecosystem).

Hive offers the ability to do something that one of my favorite books - The Richest Man in Babylon - talks about as one of the core principles of wealth creation:

"Increase thy capacity to earn"

In The Richest Man in Babylon, two key ideas stick out to me:

1. Save 1/10th of thy earnings
2. Increase thy capacity to earn

My previous article about Bitcoin could be looked at as part one of a two-part series (this being the second article). The first talks about taking a % of your income and investing it into BTC through an automated dollar cost averaging strategy (DCA).

Today, we'll focus on how you can actually earn more money by leveraging the amazing tools that are available in the crypto space.

On Leveraging Crypto Tools

Crypto offers so many tools to build wealth. There are endless combinations and a plethora of platforms out there at your disposal. Learning about the ones to use and the ones to avoid can be extremely difficult. You want to be prudent when it comes to researching and using these platforms.

The cost of using malicious or bad platforms that will actually harm you is high both from an opportunity cost and from an actual monetary cost point of view.

One of my biggest disclaimers is to always use the minimum viable amount to get started. If you have to invest thousands of dollars to try and leverage a tool, you should wonder if you can do it with hundreds... if you can, how about just a few bucks?

You want to experiment small but dive in large once you find something you can be really confident about. We saw a ton of crypto noobs lose millions of dollars in the NFT space because they were all trying to make money on moon dogs & doge coin art work. Being skeptical of things like this is a healthy approach to crypto where we have the intersection of anonymity, complex technologies and money - it attracts some of the most unsavory characters who will part you from your hard earned savings.

How to Leverage the Hive Ecosystem to Create Endless Opportunities For Financial Freedom

One of my favorite places to increase thy capacity to earn is the Hive ecosystem. The whole crypto industry now offers so many more ways to earn a living within crypto but Hive has always been far and away at the top of the list.

The ability to just come to Hive and start earning crypto is unparreleled. You can do it with $0 down and just put sweat equity into building your brand and account.

I love to use two people as examples:

1. @jongolson who always talks about leveraging various aspects of Hive - especially from a marketing/social media POV - to build his account
2. @taskmaster4450le who writes content like a machine and earns his keep as the #1 paid blogger on Hive

Hive offers a lot of opportunities. It also offers the ability to get involved in a hardcore community of people who (most of the time) are welcoming to outsiders who prove their commitment to providing value to the ecosystem.

What Are Some Ways to Earn on Hive?

Here's where things get interesting. Like I said - endless combinations of ways to make money on Hive and start stacking your account, reputation and brand.

When I started out here, it was just blogging. The only way to earn crypto was to:

1. Create long-form, high quality blogging content
2. Comment and engage with other authors and earn upvotes on comments + get them to view your content and upvote you

Today, there are so many more options. I will obviously focus on some of the more deep finance/social side since that's my general forte but there is far more to explore here on Hive. I'll include a few of those broader options that are outside of my wheelhouse and you'll have to dive into them on your own.

That's the beauty of Hive. There are literally so many options to earn that I don't even have the capacity to leverage them all. I have carved out a niche here and I tend to focus on it.

1). Blog to earn - the oldest way to earn on Hive is to simply make long-form content. It remains as one of the most consistent and rewarding ways to earn crypto here

2). Microblog to earn - a new method has emerged which is microblogging - like on Twitter - to earn LEO and HIVE. This is a platform that I obviously have my hands in.

It's never been easier to make content and engage on Hive. All you have to do is engage like you do on Twitter and watch the upvotes (and crypto) roll in.

3). HODL HIVE POWER - an obvious one - you can hold HIVE POWER and curate content (or setup an automated voting trail) and earn ~12% each year. This is fantastic if you leverage the other options to actually earn HIVE... Earn HIVE, stack it as HIVE POWER and then enjoy residual income from it.

4). HBD Savings - a relatively new method to earn is to stack the stablecoin on Hive called Hive-Backed Dollar. Holding HBD in your Hive Savings wallet will yield you 20% APR. You can claim it 1x per month. Recently a whale came out and stacked 600k HBD in savings. He's now earning $10k per month... Doing nothing!

Again, you can combine this with authoring articles and microblogs to earn both HBD and HIVE. Then you can save it and stack up and let that 20% and 12% APY residual income flow in.

5). Second-Layer Tokens - using certain interfaces and hashtags - like https://leofinance.io - will earn you second layer tokens.

Then you can go to exchange interfaces like https://leodex.io to trade those tokens or even stake them. Each token has its own set of rules and APR for staking but they essentially work identical to HIVE itself. You can (again) leverage blogging/microblogging to earn second-layer tokens and then stack them if you want for their residual income.

Do you see a theme here? You can put in sweat equity, earn some tokens, stake those HIVE, HBD, second-layer tokens and start stacking residual income.

Some users like Taskmaster have really carved out an amazing nest egg for themselves. I bet Taskmaster could sit back and just live off his residual income from the years of sweat equity he put into his content in order to achieve it. It's amazing what you can achieve when you start learning about these different options and put in the work (and it is hard work) to stack up.

6). Trade L2 Tokens - tying into the previous point. You can actually trade these tokens back and forth. If you get good at it, you can find a lot of interesting arbitrages and trades to make. Definitely a deeper financial layer to all of this stuff.

7). Splinterlands - Play-to-Earn. P2E games are starting to gain a lot of traction in the entire crypto industry and they're also becoming extremely valuable here on Hive. Splinterlands is the #1 example of this and there are other games that are popping up as well.

This is where we get a bit outside of my wheelhouse. I'm not much of a P2E gamer but I have invested at the seed stage in various P2E projects and also hold a lot of Splinterlands assets.

• you can play the game and earn
• you can hodl the NFTs (cards) and rent them out and earn
• you can buy SPS
• you can buy Splinterlands NFT assets and flip them for a return

Right now, I'm holding a ton of Chaos Legion packs (NFTs) and waiting to sell them in the future - making a bet that the game will continue to gain adoption and these NFTs will be worth more than I bought them for.

8). Share to Earn - POSH is a project that has been building itself out lately. Headed by @acidyo (long-time Hiver and witness), you can now share links to Hive content on social media (i.e. Twitter, etc.) and earn POSH tokens. Again, a great way to stack additional activities on top of regularly blogging.

9). Freelance - this one will require that you have some sort of unique skill that projects / people on Hive need. I can't tell you how many people LeoFinance has hired directly from Hive. Whether you're a graphic designer, an NFT artist, a web designer, a full-stack developer... there are so many opportunities to build a freelancing business here on Hive.

My recommendation (shocker) is to post and get active in the community. Doing that and building some name recognition for yourself is a powerful way to find clients.

10). Arbitrage Hive-Based Derivatives - again, getting into the financial weeds here. One thing that I spend a lot of time on these days is arbitraging derivatives like bHBD, bHIVE, pHBD, pHIVE. There's a lot of opportunity to leverage this and the internal market to make some quick trades for a few % returns here and there.

11). Internal Market - This one ties into the previous. On the internal market, you can trade HIVE and HBD back and forth. There are some really interesting plays to make if you can get a feel for the HIVE-HBD economy and how things work. For example, you can find moments when HBD is trading <$1 (since it is soft-pegged, you can make a play to buy it at $0.99 and wait for the peg to return to >$1 and then close the loop).

12). DeFi Products - there are DeFi products both on and off Hive that connect to Hive. CUB is obviously at the top of my list. Using https://cubdefi.com/farms, you can leverage HIVE/HBD (bHIVE & bHBD) to earn yield. Earning up to 30% APY is often possible if you have some HIVE and HBD to throw into liquidity pools.

Yet another way to stack with sweat equity and then let residual income flow in.

...

And many many more! There are dozens more that I missed and like I said, take all of the options and find ways to combine them and you have more ways to earn crypto than you'll know what to do with.

The real question is: will you actually put in the sweat equity to make them work for you?

I have a feeling this post will lead me into taking all of the above bullet points and drafting content about using each one. If you'd like to see that, leave a comment below!

About LeoFinance

LeoFinance is a blockchain-based Web3 community that builds innovative applications on the Hive, BSC, ETH and Polygon blockchains. Our flagship application: LeoFinance.io allows users and creators to engage & share micro and long-form content on the blockchain while earning cryptocurrency rewards.

Our mission is to democratize financial knowledge and access with Web3.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FinanceLeo
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Our Hive Applications

Join Web3: https://leofinance.io/
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Web3 & DeFi

Web3 is about more than social media. It encompasses a personal revolution in financial awareness and data ownership. We've merged the two with our Social Apps and our DeFi Apps:

CubFinance (BSC): https://cubdefi.com
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