In order to convert from from fiat to HBD, I need to make three trades. I need to sell my fiat into Bitcoin probably and then buy Hive with BTC. Then use the internal market to buy HBD. Each trade I lose with the spread, fees from both the exchanges and the blockchain, and take on counter party risk. I took a loss converting to HBD and hope to recover that value before I need to go back into BTC. Look at how Bittrex is not allowing withdrawals. That could have been my money. With BTC there is enough merchant adoption that I can just stay away from exchanges and spend BTC without touching these CEXes. This is not the case for Hive or HBD .