I have given some thought lately to how we could motivate more HIVE owners currently holding their tokens on exchanges to move those funds to their own Hive accounts and power up.

In that regard, I thought it would make sense to brainstorm, as a community, what we would write such people as a sales letter for why they should do so.

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^{If you were to write a sales letter to the people owning HIVE on an exchange, what would you tell them?}

It was recently brought to my attention, that while some 42% of the existing HIVE supply (excluding the DHF) is held on exchanges, while the same number is only 13% for Bitcoin. And while HIVE is probably best compared with other alt coins, it doesn't change the fact that this is a neat KPI to look at and work to improve.

At the end of the day hive is mostly purchased to speculate on it (like 99.9% of all cryptos). More than 42% of the available supply (total supply minus the DAO) is on exchanges. For example bitcoin only has ~13%...that is a big difference.

^{Quote by @onthewayout as a comment in response to Blocktrade’s post: 8th update of 2021 on BlockTrades work on Hive software.}

Motivation

Reducing this percentage figure would be beneficial to Hive for many reasons:

1. Less selling pressure
2. More governance participation, decentralization and security.
3. More participation and activity on chain, support for dApps, and feedback on direction
   To name a few....

And I think pitching Hive and Hive Power this way makes even morse sense now when there's likely to have been thousands of new HIVE owners thanks to the recent pumps who likely do not know a whole lot about the token they've just speculated on.

Impact on price

The first is probably the most obvious. With less HIVE on exchanges, it is less susceptible to selling pressure. Having more people invested for the long term instead will benefit the value of the token directly. So convincing more HIVE owners who hold their tokens on an exchange, who likely have close to no idea of what they can do with those tokens as Hive Power on chain (I know I've personally held dozens of alts as pure speculation with very little knowledge myself).

Impact on governance and security

Second, we've heard the frustrations recently of a few accounts having too much influence on governance and the DHF in particular. Additionally, the upcoming fork is implementing a governance vote delay when powering up as a mechanism primarily to defend the chain against sudden power up done by exchange accounts as happened on Steem.

Having more HIVE moved from exchanges to wallets and powered up would help in both regards. And is imo a much more productive and result-oriented strategy.

Improved ecosystem activity and contributions

Third, having more token holders active on chain gives more life to the ecosystem. This can happen directly through having more users using the sites and dApps, but also by getting more user/investor feedback and having more potential dApp and/or Tribe investors beyond their potential Hive Power delegations.

This can all make it more attractive to start communities and dApps in our ecosystem, which again makes it more attractive to stake tokens and participate, creating a positive cycle.

Is this a perfect community goal?

I think this could be a perfect “community goal” to collectively strive towards and track our progress on. To start with, we could see if we could bring the percent of tokens held on exchanges down to let’s say 30% over a year?

Nobody should be better at making this pitch than the ones who are already deciding to own HIVE as Hive Power. After all, we’ve made this decision ourselves and continue to make it every day we stay powered up.

So let’s do that!

Room for a community competition?

I would love to see a community #challenge to write the best "sales letter" to a HIVE owner on exchanges. One could simply imagine that we were getting Huobi to email this to their users with HIVE in their wallets on their exchange (something they asked us if we wanted to do back when we first got listed, but afaik we never found the time or capacity to do).

What would you write them, in one page, to encourage or convince them to move their tokens to a Hive wallet and to power up?

• Be informative, but also short and efficient.
• List what you see as the benefits of owning Hive Power. With a short sentence or two explaining it.
• Include both the potential for a positive return on investment, but also the excitement of being part of building and growing something with big potential.

I would like to encourage people like @theycallmedan, or curation accounts like @ocdb to either take the lead for such a competition or to curate good submissions made to it (a tag like #hivesalesletter would make sense).

Personally, I would love to read them and to perhaps compile the best parts I find into a "best practice" example that I would use myself as a go-to source for an effective and efficient One pager pitch.

My own recommendations for content

Regardless of whether or not this becomes a community challenge, I'll be following up with my own suggested sales letter. I think having it as an available resource to Hive promoters, dApps, or for new users to get excited can still have great value.

So what would I focus on?

• The ability to earn some staking rewards compared to holding liquid on an exchange.
• Being able to delegate to projects that may offer additional returns (like LeoFinance), and contribute to a growing ecosystem of applications and communities.
• Helping shape the development and direction of web 3.0.

But first of all, I want to have other people's feedback and inputs. I guess the only recommendation I would insist on is to not put too much weight on the perceived "ROI" coming from inflation-derived rewards like curation rewards (which is not a return on investment). Only returns received beyond inflation is actually a ROI (such as receiving additional tokens from a community or dApp with good potential), together with being able to help bring the price of HIVE higher than it is today, and thus benefiting one's investment. You can't do that from an exchange alone!

Looking forward to people's feedback :)