Analyzing the HIVE Price Pumps

Hive has been on a bit of a tear lately. The whole crypto market has seen increased (and mostly positive) trading activity, but Hive in particular has come to life recently and made some massive gains in just a short space of time. I’ve been watching it fairly closely to try and understand what’s going on and today I’d like to share some of my observations and thoughts.

Source

Take a look at the price action and the timing of these pumps. From the chart above we can see several distinctive pumps and I want to point out some of the specifics of the first 3. According to CMC Markets on Sunday the 22nd of December the price went from about 24 cents at 10am to a peak of about 40 cents at midnight – just 14 hours later making a move of +66%. Impressive. Then on Sunday the 29th of December the price went from about 33 cents at 10am to a peak of 48 cents at 9pm – just 11 hours later for a move of +45%. Nice. Then we have Sunday the 5th of January the price went from about 39 cents at 11am to a peak of 65 cents at 9pm – another 10 hour pump with a move of +66%. Happy days…

So what do we see in common here? The pumps are all a similar size and they all have similar timings. They all kick off on Sunday morning. The durations of these pumps from start to peak is also about the same, slightly declining from 14 to 11 and then 10 hours. On top of that the last one had a mid-week follow up pump on the Tuesday where the Sunday high was tested. I find this very interesting, but is there a pattern forming here or has the follow up pump signaled a change?

I also think it’s important to have a look at what the retracements are like for these pumps. The first pump retraced to find support at about 31 cents around Thursday / Friday. That’s about a 23% retracement. The second pump found support around 35 cents around Thursday / Friday. That’s about a 27% retracement. The third pump had a follow up, but looks like it might be finding support around 52 cents. It’s early Thursday so might be too hard to tell, but at 52 cents that would be about a 20% retracement. So again we see a pattern emerging with regards to timing and size of the retracements.

Finally I think it’s worth looking at the Volume although here is where it starts to get a little bit shady. Most of the volume for these pumps is coming from the Hive / Korean Won trading pair on the Upbit exchange and the Volume is far exceeding the Market Capitalization for Hive by a factor of perhaps 5 or more. This means there is likely some high frequency Wash Trading going on so we need to keep that in mind when looking at Volume. Even so, just looking at the 3 pumps I’ve outlined above, the volume appears to be increasing with each one. Does this mean that momentum is building for these pumps? Or is Hive getting harder to pump?

It certainly is interesting times for those of us who have been with Hive since the fork from STEEM. We’ve seen Hive go “Trending” on CMC a couple of times during these pumps and we are obviously getting some extra exposure with potential speculators getting involved here. We’ve seen this before and it can lead to some spectacular volatility. I personally think that Hive has a lot going for it and I’d rather see Hive get pumped than some useless Meme Coin, so if people want to gamble on crypto then they may as well do it here. I’m not sure how sustainable these pumps will turn out to be in the long run, but for now I am happy to cheer on the price action because I think we’ve been under-valued for a very long time now so it’s good to see the positive repricing.