RE: What Will Make The HIVE Token Move Upward?

Hive is, as you suggest, a utility coin. As such, it's probably not going to experience wild swings any more than ETH will experience wild swings. Right now, we're seeing all this action on ETH related to DeFi, but that doesn't mean ETH is mooning... but some of the secondary level ERC-20 tokens ARE mooning. More will.

Maybe what we should look at is not so much what will drive up the price of Hive as where the next LeoFinance is coming from.

But back to the main show: What could raise the price of Hive?

A peer-to-peer Hive based marketplace, like an eBay/Craigslist clone except running purely in Hive. A way for people to trade globally, independently of fiat. It would create demand for Hive, and strengthen the USE cases for Hive... which might attract more investors. If you're running a $100M/year marketplace, that's going to tie up a lot of tokens and likely drive the price up. It will also help in terms of lifting Hive's anemic trading volume.