The Latin American community and time as an investment in HIVE

Hi, Lions! How are you? How is your Hive journey going? We all make live in Hive, some for a hobby, some for a living, but we all are a big, global and great community that works towards the growth of our blockchain. There is more than a way of supporting the blockchain, there are people that can invest, that can hold to their rewards and grow their accounts to be at least a dolphin or an orca, but there are people who can’t do this, me included, so we do other things, investing not our money or our rewards, but a big amount of time.

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User On-boarding

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The learning curve for Hive is big, it has been reduced recently, by tutorials and courses, but those alone are not enough to get the people from web2 to come to web3. There is more word of the mouth awareness than people finding Hive and the tutorials on their own. Latin América is a big market, huge, and given the nature of the blockchain, it is also an important one. To get more informed users that will actually use their accounts, we create onboarding events, meetups and programs, such as “Hive desde Cero” and “Hive por mi cuenta”.

These two programs have helped hundreds of users to understand what is Hive and what are they going to do here before creating their accounts. A lot of the attendees don’t finish the programs, but that is actually a good thing, we want them realizing if they are or not interested in Hive, or willing to make the effort, before making an account and taken an username that maybe someone else willing to put the effort might want.

With the meet-ups we have gotten to unify the community, locally and nationwide, making it possible to do collaborations in the bigger events that requires not just the effort on the logistics of the local team but the experience and support of the user from around the country. Two major events that have required this kind of collaboration have been the Caracas Blockchain Week and the Expo TecnoDigital Barquisimeto 2023, but not only those, also events on Zulia and Valencia has reunited Hivers from around the country.

With such a support from the community, the potential users trust more the information given; they also feel encouraged for all the success stories, bringing a lot of new projects from those events.

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Business on-boarding

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This is something that is getting really powerful in Venezuela. Teams like Hive Sucre, Hive Barquisimeto, Hive Valencia and Hive Zulia, have made contact with business owners to show them how easy it is to join Hive and receive HBD as a payment method, we also have taught them how to keep using HBD to grow and how to use the exchanges when they need fiat to restock.

This also means we are working on getting the community aware of these places, growing the community itself and teaching our members to manage their income on Hive, so they can grow their accounts while still using the rewards for their needs.
Onboarding a business usually requires more than one visit, it requires gaining the trust of the Business owners, explaining how this would not carry any problem to them but open them to a wider market, and following up to help them get used to the new environment until they are good on their own.

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Schools and Universities outreach

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These are some of the most beautiful activities, which I will talk about the Venezuelan ones because those are the ones I have experienced firsthand, but I know those are also done on Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries.
One of the programs is called “Hive va a la escuela” or “Hive goes to School” and it’s performed by danielvehe from rutablockchain. This program consist on presentations to the students on their school, about all the web3 world and how Hive is a door to it that can help them in the development of their career, it can helps them build a path and explore their passions, while being rewarded for the good content and owning their ideas. It’s a very dynamic conversation that makes web3 more accessible to them. They also get to participate in a contest to win 1k HBD doing a mural about Hive and web3. The age of these kids is about 14 to 18 years old, they are on their last years of school, about to decide what career to follow, and while they are some that will directly relate to the blockchain development, they can also see how useful Hive could be to any of their passions.

Other program that aims a more mature target is Hive goes to University, which recently got the name rebranded to “Hive Talk University” This is because we (I’m part of the team that runs this program) are not only doing this with universities but with other institutions and group of people, so the main name is “Hive Talk” and the rest shows the kind of talk we are doing. These Hive Talk University are crafted to match the careers imparted on said university. The university students already decided a career, so we take advantage of that to develop a more specific presentation.

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A few days ago we made one for the School of Science and Technology of the “Universidad Centroccidental Lisandro Alvarado” (UCLA), there we received students and teachers from Computer Engineering, Production Engineering, Telematics Engineering, and others. This allowed us to present Hive to the future blockchain developers, making them native of the web3. We also got teachers onboard, and created links with the University to perform more projects now not just for information but as part of their academic plans. Next week we have a webinar session with the students and teachers from this presentation, this time not just with us the local team, but with other Spanish-speakers developers on Hivethat have experience on web3 development, nodes, games, and more.

These are just two examples of more events being held to onboard students from different ages and knowledge areas, to work on Hive as content creators and even as developers, marketing, and so much more.

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Non-monetary investment: Time investment

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The latin community gets a lot of support, but also a lot of critics regarding our use of the rewards, seeing it as we don’t supporting the blockchain because we don’t power-up most of our rewards, we usually use our HBD for a living and only the Hive is left staked, there are even times where we have to power-down because we need it, not because we want to.

But the Latin community is the more active when it comes to create awareness and promote the onboarding of business, attends events, does meet-ups, and built the brand from the outside. These activities require a lot of effort into planning and executing, they are as demanding as a full time job and are done voluntarily. Sure there is coverage of transportation and food, but the hours put into each event, if we were to measure in non-latin wages, are way more than most people have invested from their fiat into Hive, and even more than most have powered up.

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Some events require a month of work into planning, marketing, logistics, getting the merch, training the participants, holding meetings, hosting, preparation to perform the presentations, and all that can come up during the pre-event, let’s say they’re done on the clock (which they are not, we work more hours) and that we get $10 an hour, it would be an investment of $2400. Those right now are about 6.153 Hives. If we got that payment to power up, with two big events we will be dolphins already. But that’s a volunteering job, so we don’t ask to get paid, we are granted the food, transportation, hydration, and uniforms, also some merch, and that is awesome, but that is our way to invest into Hive.

So the time investment we put into Hive is worth the same as the money investment a lot of people is able to afford. Sadly we live in economies where the prices are nowhere near to cover basic needs, so the rewards we get on posts have to go to cover necessities and emergencies. We keep doing the work here because we believe it is worth the hard job now to be able to live from Hive and for Hive in the future.

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I hope you can see now the great labor the Latin community do for Hive e, and are more understanding as to why it is so hard for us to grow our stake and don’t touch our rewards as soon as we get them, even though we want to become Dolphins and Orcas, and even Whales in the future. And if you are Latin, there are different ways to support Hive, one of them is helping with the brand awareness and the time and effort put into it does have a value and it is as important to the blockchain as staking and investing money. Let’s keep building Hive from our own possibilities!