Qurator Changes After the HardFork, and More QuratorTokens!

By participating in the @qurator project, we can earn daily upvotes on our posts, participate in contests with larger upvotes as prizes, among other things. It's a project that I like a lot, and I've already written a very detailed post explaining how it works.

Image source: one of the Qurator project's promotional banners

Recently, after the HardFork 21 (or more precisely 22, because of that little HF that occurred to fix bugs in 21), Qurator announced some changes.

• Those who upvote Qurator posts now get back "the total amount of votes from the previous week times 1.4" (it used to be 1.1).
• There is now only one monthly subscription option to receive larger upvotes (there were five before). The subscription will cost 2 STEEM, to receive upvotes as if they were from a 5,000 SP account (previously, it cost 4 STEEM to receive 4,000 SP upvotes!).

And there are also the QuratorTokens, which give us daily payouts in STEEM just for having them (no need to stake). This STEEM comes from Qurator's curation rewards (50% of their curation rewards go to QuratorToken holders). The first round tokens that were sold on the Steem Engine market were gone quickly, and the only way to get the token became to buy them from someone (for a higher price) or to delegate SP to Qurator until the second round of token issuance arrived. It turns out that with the changes brought by the HardFork, Qurator's curation rewards have increased so much that they have already reached the goal they wanted in order to start the second round of tokens! There are 10,000 more QuratorTokens in circulation, and 3,000 for sale on the STEEM engine market. The the official announcement post is here. It's worth to note tthat you don't even need to be a Qurator member to buy the tokens, although becoming a member is completely free.

After seeing so many people complaining that they're earning less after the HardFork, it's good to see communities like Qurator reaping benefits. It is becoming clearer that now, curating and participating in tribes to get interesting tokens is where it's at.

By the way, my QuratorTokens (for now I only have 5.5 that I had won) have been giving me some interesting returns. Around 0.89% per week (the guaranteed minimum is 0.70% per Q per week), more than the returns of my SP delegation to Brazilians, which gives 0.38% per week ... now that I have taken my first step in investing in STEEM, I'm considering to buy some more QuratorTokens since the STEEM prices are low. I'll have to decide soon, because there are only 3,000 for sale and they'll probably be gone soon!

PS: I was alerted that each Q is costing 3 STEEM, unlike the first round ones that cost 1 STEEM. I asked for clarifications, and the response was that they had to adjust the price to the current market values in order to avoid crashing the Q market. While I understand the reason, 3 STEEM for each token is a bit much for my pocket. Maybe I won't buy more, after all... or if I do, it'll be way less token than I'd have liked...

PS 2: still thinking about this and making calculations. Those returns percentages listed above were based on the tokens at 1 STEEM, which was the price when I got mine. With the Q token costing 3 times that, the current returns would be 1/3 of the one I listed (meaning around 0.31% a week, which is still pretty nice, around 14.88% per year). For now, Brazilian's 0.38% are still winning, but Q is close enough. And as they say, we should avoid having all our eggs in only one basket, it may be a good idea to get some Qs too. Still thinking!