Talent Land 2025 Recap

First of all, I’m beyond happy to have met such a talented and dedicated group of Hiveans at Talent Land Guadalajara 2025. A lot of the preparation for the conference - the HIVE booth in particular - was done months before the conference even started. I got there a couple of days before the conference and the airbnbs were already booked, the stand was built and the merch was already there too.

On Sunday evening, right before the conference, we went over the onboarding process, which involved several tools developed by Hiveans like https://app.holahive.com/?ticket=holahive, Hive Debit and Distriator. These were fundamental in showing newcomers everything you can do in the HIVE ecosystem.

From early Monday morning until the very end on Thursday, the crew was working hard to show curious people the powerful tools available on HIVE. So hats off to the amazing Talent Land team. HIVE loves you.

We had a very neat onboarding workflow. Big shoutout to @starkerz for envisioning what I consider the fastest and most useful account creation system yet. Props to @starkerz and @starkerz for helping create this.

If you haven’t tried https://app.holahive.com/ yet, you absolutely should. New users scan a QR to get there and follow a 3-step account creation process.

We had bunch of account creation tickets for this purpose, so new users didn’t have to worry about paying for their account. One less point of friction.

The Hive protocol uses public/private key pairs to sign messages. It’s important to keep your keys in a safe place and Keychain is an awesome tool to do that. Since new users copied their master password to the clipboard in the previous step, all they had to do was paste it into Keychain to import. Easy as pie.

So folks could see how awesome HIVE-based social media front ends are and also get $2 in HBD in the process.

The last step, Spend $HBD, was super awesome because new users had a few different options to buy stuff at businesses that accepted HBD directly or accepted Bitcoin over Lightning.

Out of these three options, you might have seen some of my videos paying with Keychain and v4v. I've been using those for a long time, but Hive Debit was the new kid on the block and the coolest! Check out just how easy it is to tap your card on an NFC reader and pay:

I think we did an awesome job of showing businesses at the conference how awesome the HIVE protocol is. We even managed to create accounts for at least two businesses OUTSIDE of Talent Land where the team held side events: @elsentidobarsano, which is where the above video was taken

and Berlins Bretzel Wagen (@berlins), an awesome beer garden with authentic pretzels, very alcoholic german beer, more grafitti than Kreutzberg and techno where some side-events were held after I had already left Guadalajara. Check out this post by @bobaphet.

The family who run Berlins very much love bitcoin just like me, so I know they'll feel right at home using the HIVE protocol.

Come say hi as they are both super pumped about a protocol that lets you truly own your data and monetize your content with value4value philosophy.

What can be improved?

Don’t get me wrong. The booth looked fantastic! BUT it didn’t quite communicate the power of the HIVE blockchain. Maybe next time we can showcase some of the amazing dApps built on HIVE. For example, we could have live Splinterlands battles and prizes…

Or how about a live INLEO threads feed with #talentland2025 to showcase Hive as a decentralized alternative the current short-form content platforms like X or NOSTR?

Yes, we are dealing with technology that is on the bleeding edge of innovation. I understand, but people’s attention spans are short and buggy tech can be unconvincing. We need to be able to showcase the tech in as few steps as possible with 0 bugs. No error codes, clear messaging, fast buttons.

The Hive volunteers on-site did an amazing job with the tools they had. Recording videos on their mobile phones and using free software to edit and upload, but there was definitely space and time to do high quality interviews with top guests and a full-on TV quality setup. This would have not only given us amazing content to send home, it would have been very eye-catching at the conference. I bet more people would have come to the booth. Plus, having 1 or two people dedicated to producing content would have allowed everybody else to focus on showcasing the apps and explaining the tech.
We don't even need to hire anybody as Hiveans who were there already have the gear and the experience. Shameless plug for @recording-box.

I think we could have asked new Hive citizens to share some photos or a few words on their web2 social media accounts and give HIVE a follow. I bet some of them have a huge following and could have given Hive a lot of exposure.

All in all, my experience as a promoter of HIVE’s #freedomtools at Talent Land gets an 8/10. If I get invited to participate again in the near future, I will definitely say yes! I believe investing funds from HIVE’s DAO, the DHF, to have community members onboarding users at conferences like this is way more effective than flying motorcycles, wrapping rally cars or sponsoring European sports teams that have nothing to do with blockchain technology. #justsaying

▶️ 3Speak