A Breakdown Of The HIVE Historical Supply

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(Edited)

The supply of a coin is quite an important thing. Also, its inflation. A very common question about a project is what it is supply?

As many things around here the HIVE supply is a bit special 😊.
Let’s take a look!

01.png

If you take a look at the other coins, let’s say Bitcoin, the supply and the inflation over time is pretty simple. There is a certain amount of tokens circulation, inflation level set, and the supply keeps increasing over time. Usually in time the inflation drops.

However, as many things on Hive this is not that simple.

The reason?

The main reason would be the dual token economy with HIVE and HBD, and the conversions between this two. HIVE has its stablecoins, that in a sense its maybe before the time, since we are now seeing a lot of stablecoins popping out and the defi movement is partially evolving around them.

The current Hive inflations allocation is as follows:

  • Authors 32.5%
  • Curators 32.%
  • Witnesses 10%
  • HP holders 15%
  • DAO/DHF 10%

Inflation shared in five pools.
One would thing if we track the above (five pools!) it will be sufficient to get the history of the HIVE supply. But no. To get the complete picture we need few more things:

  • HBD conversions to HIVE
  • HBD supply and its virtual supply to HIVE

If we head over to https://hiveblocks.com/, at the moment we will see this

01a.png

374 million HIVE in circulation and 4.6M HBD. When converted at current price this 4.6M HBD ads around 40M more HIVE on top of the supply to a total of 415M virtual HIVE supply. Try explaining this to the coin aggregators like CMC or Coingecko 😊. This virtual supply is changing daily depending on the price of HIVE.

Note: I want to emphasis that the data bellow is kind of revers engendering the supply. I have taken the current numbers for the supply and extracted all the inflation from the rewards back to the starting point. It is most likely not a 100% accurate, but its shows the overall picture.

Let’s dig into this!

HIVE Authors rewards

Here is the chart for the all-time HIVE authors rewards.

02.png

Authors receive rewards on HIVE in three currencies. Liquid HIVE, Hive Power and HBD. The chart above represents the authors rewards in HIVE and Hive Power. HBD rewards are not included. The HBD supply will be analyzed separately. One can say just double the numbers above and you will get the total authors rewards. This will be close enough, but we will take a look at the HBD conversions in more details.

A total of 40M HIVE and Hive Power rewarded to authors since inceptions. The period for the previous version of Hive, also included. If HBD rewards are included this number will be virtually double. But users don’t convert HBD to HIVE instantly when they get the rewards, so this math is a bit of.

We can notice a flattening in the authors rewards towards the end of the chart, mainly because of the switch from 75/25 to 50/50 split in authors/curators share.

Curation rewards

The chart for the curatio rewards looks like this.

03.png

Luckily curation rewards are earned only in one currency, Hive Power, so things are a bit simpler here. I have kept the axis scale for the chart on a same level as for the authors rewards for better comparison. A total of 25M issued to curators.

Witness rewards

Currently 10% of the inflation goes to witness.

04.png

The witnesses have received a total of 16.7M HIVE.

Staking rewards

Hive Power holders receive staking rewards for holding HP. Their HP is increased each day by a very tiny amount. The current APY for HP staking rewards is around 3.4%.

05.png

A total of 17M have went to staking rewards and HP holders. The staking rewards are around 10k HIVE per day. Now the interesting thing is that they are generated from the HIVE per VEST ratio and not with a hard transaction so to speak.

HIVE from HBD Conversions

HIVE can be generated by HBD conversions as well. When HBD is put in conversion its being destroyed in a period of 3 days and the average price is taken from that period when HIVE is printed.

06.png

This is quite interesting. A lot of HIVE has been generated trough conversions. Authors that receive their rewards in HBD are converting a lot of it. Especially in the last period.

A total of 61M HIVE has been put in circulation from HBD conversions. If we compare this with the total author rewards of 40M, we can see that more HIVE has been generated in this way. The low price of HIVE is basically generating more inflation trough HBD conversion.

HBD Supply

Now let’s take a look at the HBD supply.

07.png

HBD is put into circulation trough author rewards and from recently from the DAO/DHF. At the same time, it is been taken out of circulation with conversion that we saw above. Because of this the supply of HBD can go up and down.

From the chart we can see that historically the HBD supply has been highest when the prices for HIVE were high. A 15M HBD at one point. When the prices were mooning in January 2018 on a few occasions there is more than 100k HBD printed per day. Nowdays the rate of printing HBD is much smaller at a rate od 3 to 5k per day.

Actually, if we take look at the HIVE market cap of around 40M and the HBD supply od 4.6M, the debt is more than 10% and HBD should be stop printing. But the blockchain most likely is taking a different HBD to HIVE ratio then the market and its still printing HBD.

If we convert the HBD to HIVE we will get the following.

08.png

Interesting the virtual HIVE supply from HBD is at a highest point these days. This again is because of the low HIVE prices, and we can see the sharp increase in the virtual HIVE from HBD.

Historical HIVE Supply

If we combine all the supply generated from the rewards and the conversions above we get this.

09.png

As mentioned at the begging the chart is generated from the current supply and then extracting the rewards back to the starting supply.

CategoryHIVE
Authors40,358,132
Curators25,279,110
Witnesses16,723,110
Staking17,294,091
HBD Conversions61,051,016
Total160,705,459

A total of 160.7M HIVE has been added. When we extract this from the current supply of 374M, we are left with 213.3M HIVE to start. This is roughly the supply that was mined at the start, when Hive, then Steem started. There were a few months mining back then and the stake above is probably generated in that period.

If we add the virtual HIVE supply from HBD we get this.

10.png

More than 400M HIVE in circulation including the virtual supply.

At the end one clean chart for the HIVE supply 😊.

11.png

I’m planning to use this chart going forward to plot the share of historical HP in it as well.

If we extract the start year supply, we get this:

SupplyHIVE generated in the previous year
01.1.2017243,000,000243,000,000
01.1.2018264,000,00021,000,000
01.1.2019292,000,00028,000,000
01.1.2020335,000,00043,000,000
10.11.2020374,000,00039,000,000


In 2019 the real HIVE inflation is 43M. This is 14.7%. The projected inflation for 2019 was around 26M and 8%. 2020 is not over yet but the absolute numbers will most likely be somewhere around 45M, or more than 13% inflation, compared to the 26M projected at 7.5%.

This is the weight of the pump from 2017/2018. Large amounts of HBD was generated then at it is benign converted in the last years increasing the projected inflation by almost double. The good news is that HBD is generated in very small amounts now and its supply it is at reasonable level.

All the best
@dalz

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43 comments
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I like to read this
The good news is that HBD is generated in very small amounts now and its supply it is at reasonable level.

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Yep ... now we just need the price to go up a bit :)

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That's right,need the price to go up a bit, for motivate us much more to keep working :)

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I believe that this climb will be natural. This period is very good to accumulate more and I hope that more people have this thought.

HIVE will still give us many good surprises and as always a great job presented by you.

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It is great to have such a diversified balancing of the HIVE tokens although I think that the supply is immense at this moment for what the blockchain needs and the number of users on it. Maybe it will add some more business layers to consume that out or be used by communities, but something needs to happen in order not to have an "infinite" supply without the demand for it.

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The inflation/supply can be easily squashed by the growth. Hope we get this in the future as the general crypto market turns and we do more build here!

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I've been here for almost 3 years and it's still a little difficult to wrap my head around all of this. I think this graphics help me understand a little bit better and also are very interesting. I believe HIVE has a great future and at the moment we are going through a test to see who is here for the long term.

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I've been here for almost 3 years and it's still a little difficult to wrap my head around all of this

It was a challenge for me as well :)

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On Hive we will never run out of things to learn. :)

Continuous learning is the way.

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True that! I keep learning every day but I remember my first weeks on the platform it was crazy! So much information and so many things I could not understand at the beginning but with time, study and perseverance I was able to beat that learning curve.

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Me too I remember those days. So grateful for all of the content creators who make educational content.

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Because the printing of HBD as decreased rather drastically, it stands to reason that the price is more likely to go up from the 2020 levels than the 2019 levels.

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I just don't feel positive at all with the printing of HBD. seems like an excessive that we don't really need.

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HBD can be very useful if done right.
Hope we will tweak its economy going forward.

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the last bull run prints too much HDB IMO, that's with HBD Conversions is meh

Btw really good overview, thanks @dalz

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So, we can reduce inflation by choosing to trade HBD for Hive on a market, instead of converting it?

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I dont think so. When you trade HBD for HIVE you dont destroy it
Its destroyed only when converted.

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You do have to wonder about the inflation, when the vast majority of BTC has been printed, and I think the same for BAT and RUNE too, I mean I know they're all different, but Hive, it just keeps on printing....

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The majority of HIVE should be printed as well :)
In 2030 I believe there should be around 600M (probably will be more), and then "only" 2% inflation .... around 12M per year.

So a 400M out of 600, is a majority :)

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Well I guess that's an optimistic way of looking at it, now all we need is a few more people who want to buy the stuff!

2% inflation isn't too bad!

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One reason the price is so low l (and people forget this) is that we aren’t just Hive, we are steem-pre-fork and have all that extra printed Hive but a much smaller community. Once we get our user numbers up, we will stabilize much higher than where we are

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This is a big factor in the decline of price. We lost a lot of users after the hardfork and this has caused a lot of sell pressure.

Over time as we stabilize the user base and have a growth mindset from the users still here and that have been added. The price will rise again.

I use other sources of online revenue to keep buying hive and as long as other have the same commitment to the chain and the development keep coming over time we will start creeping back up again. It's not about the price it's about the people committed to building here.

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Hive price is very low. In my opinion, there is hyperinflation because hive circle around hive users only. There should be extending receivers of hive to reduce the inflation. Hive payment is the solution. People outside hive cycle can hold hive by selling products or services.

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Really a lot of useful information that explains well the mechanism of supply and annual inflation that is still very high at the moment and this is a weak point for HIVE

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Excellent work! We've got some real numbers to go on!

And, albeit inadvertent, I'd say it's a fairly decent real inflation rate.

Good job.

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Thanks! It was a challenge making this :)

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@dalz,
Thank you very much for sharing these figures. I personally believe Author / Curator share should cut from 2.5% each & share that with Witness & DAO funds.
$tangent

Cheers~

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I personally believe Author / Curator share should cut from 2.5% each & share that with Witness & DAO funds.

Or instead we can just cut the overall inflation :)

This said, I don't think Hive inflation is to high. We have new DeFi projects coming out now with 100% inflation and more.
We just need to make the staking rewards mechanism better and create more growth.

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(Edited)

@dalz,
Good thought to test with a HE token project.

Or instead we can just cut the overall inflation :)

The economy model of HIVE / STEEM are social media based, so I don't think this might work well.

Cheers~

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I mean lower it down :)

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@dalz,
You mean no more tokens. Not a bad idea. But what is the way of sustain the project then?

Cheers~

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That's the thing, when we dumb inflation increases, but when we pump it goes down, and will be less than the projected one. It creates massive shortages in liquidity.

This causes the price to go up much faster in bull markets but doesn't allow whales to accumulate. We need retail to pump it, buying at any price.

I would love to remove HBD completely, it's just bad. The DAO can adjust payments using the witness price feed.

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I would love to remove HBD completely, it's just bad. The DAO can adjust payments using the witness price feed.

I would like HBD just to be improved a bit.

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(Edited)

The Hive scenario is pretty bleak, but we all have to believe that things will get better and work to make it happen.

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I would like to see HBD 1:1 like Tether or DAI. As you observed, even though we are past the 10% limit for HBD, more HBD keeps going into circulation. I would have liked to see the HBD to no longer be printed until it gets back down to 2.5% of the virtual Hive and to no longer print HBD at or after 5%.

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