It's clear that there is very little interest in staking in the platform. What the comparison between vesting and divesting show is that in general the users of the network are more interested in treating Hive as a faucet. I am not convinced that removing the social layer will change that behaviour. If we do it stakeholders will simply shift from cashing out the curation/author rewards to cashing out their staking rewards.

Now that I say it out loud it sounds very bleak.

Although if we analyze what happens in the crypto world in general is that people buy into narratives. People buy into bitcoin because they believe the narrative that the limited supply makes it a store of value...for instance. So what is our narrative and what do we do to make sure that people that believe it want to participate?

Saying that we are the blockchain for web 3.0 (as it reads on the hive.io website) is not enough. What does that even mean to regular folks? Not much if you ask me. Even the steem.com site has more punch to it (it's a bunch of lies but nonetheless).

One thing is true...we can't sit around and wait.