I have been around Hive since February 9, 2021. In just under one year, I have accomplished something that I think is pretty cool! I'm about to be a Millionaire (I'm 0.00000001 away)...Here's the story and how I got here...

I was posting every day in December. I had a goal to earn the Hivebuzz badge for posting every day for a month (I did by the way...post every day in December). On December 5, I read about a game called Psyber-X that was coming to Hive. I saw the preview video. You can see it here:

After watching this video, I had to ask more questions. I went to their website, https://www.royalreptilestudios.com/ as I've always wanted to create my own game and I saw you can hire them to make your own game...pretty cool, huh?! Well, the more I asked and dug into the world of Psyber-X, the more I realized this would not be a normal game and it would blow all the games away that are attached to Hive. To back this up a little-I have played dCity and I have a nice little village. It's big enough to earn me about 6 SIM per day, depending on what tax rate the president uses. It's very boring, in my opinon, hard to learn, and very passive. There's no there there.

I looked at Splinterlands and saw it was a card game. I was turned off immediately. If I want to play a card game, I'll get cards out in person. I've played Magic the Gathering and have no desire to do that online...it just seems geeky and lame. ...again, my opinion. I'm cool if you like it...I just don't.

I joined the discord channel, which I don't like discord, but I joined it anyway. I wanted to know what was going on. There, I started seeing never before seen footage of the game, characters, NFT's, etc. I read how for every 200K LVL you have in your possession, you'll get 1 crate fully of goodies to be used in the game. Then about 2 weeks ago, they said their marketplace isn't up and running yet, so they upped it to 2 crates per 200K LVL and that the crates will retail for $20 when they start selling them in the marketplace...I did the math. On December 5, LVL was at 0.0004 per coin. Seriously?!

That's not it...We all understand how bitcoin gets a lot of its value from the fact that it has a limited supply, right? LVL is limited by the creators of Psyber-X to 500M coins. That's it, no more! Get this...their plan is to make MULTIPLE games tied to LVL. Psyber-X is just the first. Did you read that? 500M coins and it's capped! More games to come, free crates...OMG! That's not all...Because they know they'll be developing more games tied to LVL, they're holding 15% of the supply for future game development. That's 75M LVL essentially frozen from the supply. That means there are 425M LVL to be sold and circulated.

Again, I started doing the math...if I can buy 1M LVL, I'll own 0.2% of the total supply. That's HUGE!!!

SO, I Green-Candled UP baby! Look at my souvenir!

How I did it:

I have been powering down my Hive Power for a while now. I invested $2K into Hive when I first joined, knowing what would happen to it based on my experience with SteemIt 4 years ago (thus why this is bobthebuilder2 and not bobthebuilder). I wanted to take out the 2K I started with because I had more than doubled it in the year. With the Hive I was powering down, I put it into BXT. I staked BXT (and still do) because it pays me in liquid Hive every day from the swap fees people pay to use their service (0.25% to move Hive to the Hive Engine instead of 1% through the Hive Engine exchange itself...it's a great deal!!!) It turns out I make about 0.01 Hive per BXT I stake per day. That's pretty amazing... I used a couple hundred Hive to buy LVL. Then I started to use daily earnings to buy LVL. I also bought a Leo Mega Miner and several smaller Leo Miners, as well as a STEM miner (I have a love for Stem...just do). All of these miners provided fundage for buying more LVL each day or for filling liquidity pools with great APR's.

Then I saw that people were starting to spread word about LVL. I knew I needed to pressure my purchases and prioritize. I had Hive in Liquid Pools with BXT, earning approx. 90% apr and I would use those daily paid out earnings to buy more LVL. I also have OneUp:Swap.Hive pools I put more into. Between the BXT:Swap.Hive pool and the OneUp:Swap.Hive pool, I had added about 600 Hive into liquidity pools.

For those who don't know what a liquidity pool is, I didn't know either until about a month ago...they are used to make it easier to swap out one currency for another, rapidly. Instead of hitting the strike prices offered by Hive Engine, a swap for one coin to another will often give you a better price. They can offer the better prices by people putting equal amounts of the coins on both sides of the swap. To incentivize people to put up their coins for swapping, rewards are offered and the ones I was in were offering 90-200% APR's...if you know anything about compound interest, you'll know this is amazing...

I digress. LVL got hot! See Jan 15's candle. It spiked earlier than I wanted it to...so, I had to remove liquidity and buy some LVL to get my goal before it was too late. I dropped about 600 Hive into LVL a couple days ago (see the candle). Today, I was about 16,000 LVL away from being a LVL Millionaire. I could either wait (and see the price keep going up) or I could liquidate a little more of my oneup:swap.hive pool (I had already liquidated my BXT:Swap.Hive pool to get the 600 Hive) and buy what I needed to get to the 1M mark. I stopped 0.00000001 short because I like dramatic effect....

Don't worry, I'll get some more. Anyway, before I removed the pool liquidity, I went through and sold almost all the liquid coins I was holding. It got me to within a couple thousand. I kept pulling from the pool and finally got what I needed to be where I am.

I am stoked! I am so happy to have reached my goal. I have spent about the equivalent of $1000 for LVL that is now worth about $3000.

What's next?

Psyber-X is coming out with a video on February 6. It is their first release of gameplay, as I understand it. After that, they're going to keep dropping PR bombs...meaning they're going to keep showing us cool stuff. Here's the kicker...Fervor for this game will only get frothier until it comes out. If you look into games on Hive, you'll see the most popular is Splinerlands with over 300K users.
source: https://dappradar.com/rankings/category/games

Splinterlands is not just the most popular Hive blockchain game, it is the most popular game of all blockchains according to https://dappradar.com/rankings/category/games

The next closest on Hive is Rabona with 219 active users...If you looked at the game trailer I posted above from YouTube, it's pretty obvious this will kick all of these games' butts to me...

source: https://dappradar.com/rankings/protocol/hive/category/games

So, while I am not giving financial advice, I do suggest you weigh the options. Consider the trends. Consider the graphics...

source: discord channel...ok per admins...wanna see more? Join the Discord channel here: https://discord.gg/U48S6Ng7XB

Do your research. Learn more. Be curious. I think this is the first time I've been this high on a richlist, though I think I'm high up on VYB's richlist at the moment...maybe POB's, too...I dunno.

Final Suggestions:

(not financial advice) Stake your coins. Interact with others. Follow curation trails if you know you can't curate all the time so that when you're gone, you're still earning, but curate when you can be around. Engage with people. Spend some of your HBD or Hive and buy callout coins like !Pizza, !Alive, !Beer, !LOLZ, !Wine, !PGM, etc. I guarantee people feel !LUV and !Alive when you toss them a !Wine or !Beer bottle or share a joke that makes them !LOLZ while you all play games with !PGM. Join a liquidity pool, just to see how it works. Lastly, have Fun and follow me...I say cool things...haha...oh really quick...I forgot to mention CARTEL! You may want to research that coin. In the "Play2Earn" community, they are building players that are awesome and are collectively adding resources to win a lot more in games like Splinterlands and Psyber-X when it goes live... Keep your eyes peeled. The OneUp community is going to be roaring!!!