Hive Is Much More Suitable For Onboarding Regular People than EVMs...

... and yet everyone is flocking over there, mainly because that's where the money is and most people in crypto are gamblers.

That doesn't mean Hive doesn't have its flaws because it does.

But during the INLEO AMA yesterday I was reminded of a regular scam that runs on EVMs, on top of the usual million-dollar-worth of rug pulls, LPs being drained due to flaws exploited in the smart contracts, and so on.

EVMs and Scam Tokens

What I've been reminded of yesterday was scam tokens, often received as airdrops.

Everyone who used an EVM chain for a significant amount of time received such tokens. I have around 50 tokens on Polygon alone, some of them are already identified as spam or suspicious. In fact, I currently use only a few tokens on Polygon, the rest are either remainders of tokens I used in the past or tokens that are potentially dangerous.

On the list of my Polygon tokens, on polygonscan we can see something like this:

Note the label they receive on the right.

The way that scam (not spam) tokens work on EVMs is they entice their recipients (that's you, if you fall for it), to swap them for a more well-known token or something you want to add to your portfolio. That's why they usually have some nice dollar value, to draw your attention toward them and make sure users attempt to swap them.

I don't know the inner workings of EVMs, but I know when you approve a swap, you allow the smart contract running the token to make a transaction of a limited amount from your wallet. Those contracts usually set the limit very high, so they can steal funds from your wallet. Most people won't bother looking at the maximum amount they allow when approving a transaction, so they fall for it. In fact, the best protection against such tokens is to never interact with them at all. If you don't know where you received a token from on an EVM and can't find clear details about it, leave it alone, even if the dollar amount appeals to you. Alternatively, if you only have a few tokens that matter in your wallet, before you interact with it, move them all to a different wallet. Then, even if it's a scam, it can't steal anything from your wallet.

Hive and Hive-Engine More User Friendly

On Hive L1 you can't do any of the above. So nothing like this can happen with HIVE or HBD, as far as I am aware. One reason why you can't do it with HIVE and HBD is because Hive doesn't have (and probably never will have) smart contracts at the base layer. If they are at the second layer, they can affect what is on the second layer, but not the base layer. That, on top of scalability issues of smart contracts at the base layers.

On Hive-Engine, which is still the only highly-used Hive sidechain, some bad things are possible, but for example, you can never be worried that by swapping two tokens you can lose funds from your account as it is possible on EVMs.

Since swaps are a regular operation, if users don't have to worry about them is a great deal. Not to mention swap fees on HE are very good for small transactions since they are on a percentage base (0.25%).

That being said, spam tokens exist on Hive-Engine too, but they are harmless, and can be sold without worrying. A H-E token is not protected from rug pull or changes to the tokenomics from the owner, as is not on EVMs either (although on EVMs they found the solution to automatically delay the time when a contract becomes effective after being published so that people can take action before a malicious change can be introduced, via timelocks). Unlike EVMs however, on Hive/Hive-Engine, owners have a social reputation, which they will harm if they start getting involved in shady things.

User Experience

I've been involved in various ecosystems in different degrees. I can honestly say EVMs don't rank well on user experience. That includes many of the UIs, but mostly, the fees and pitfalls that the unsuspecting user can run into. Like the one with scam tokens, which opens the door for stealing funds from the user's account by exploiting a feature of the blockchain.

EVMs do have interoperability, a big set of developer tools for their impressive development community, and tons of money. That keeps them on top of the game, despite other drawbacks.

Hive doesn't excel on user interfaces either, with very few counterexamples. When you have an ecosystem that is much better suited for onboarding regular people, UI and UX should be a priority. And slowly, we can see a few examples where they started to become one. We also have onboarding systems that counterintuitively act as bottlenecks in bringing in many new users. But maybe we figured out a form of lite Hive account that is really powerful. We'll talk about it another time.

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Posted Using InLeo Alpha