Sit down. Either read this in one take or sip slowly, one section at a time over a few days. I want to textually punch you in the gut about the reality of the blockchain I am investing in.
HIVE hit 5 cents.
That sentence should hurt.
Coins go up and down. Markets bleed. Crypto is brutal but still price changes are just noise. But an all-time low has a very specific meaning: every person who ever bought HIVE and held that bet is now at a loss.
Everyone.
Every old buyer, every believer, every person who trusted the vision and did not sell higher is underwater. That is what an all-time low means. It is not an opinion. It is the market laughing at every bagholder who believed.
And I am one of them as I keep buying and powering up slowly.
I am not writing this while dumping. I am writing this while doing the financially stupid thing that believers do: buying more of the thing that keeps disappointing them.
So nobody can honestly say this is FUD from a hater.
This is worse. This is a frustrated lover of Hive saying the current model does not work. I love Hive, I have loved it as an author, as a witness, as a dev on some frontends, as an attendee to events... I love Hive and I hope my not only my words but my history on this blockchain proves it.
CoinGecko shows HIVE around 5 cents, down from an all-time high around $3.41. Depending on the tracker and the minute you check, we are around a 27 to 30 million dollar market cap chain now.
That is a tiny hobby-level market cap.
So we need to start thinking like a tiny chain trying to survive, not like a giant protocol cosplaying as a nation.
And the core question is do we want to stay niche or grow? This will be the core inflection decision point of the whole post.
The DHF is not free money
The Hive developer docs say the DHF receives 10% of the annual new supply.
That means every DHF proposal is effectively asking the community:
“Can I create inflation and sell it? Can I dillute your HIVE Power?”
Or more brutally:
“Can I dump this dream into whatever exit liquidity still exists? Can I dump it whuile you buy it from me?”
That is what it comes down to unless the money is coming from real outside income, real customers, real investors, real business revenue, or real VC money that does not dilute HIVE buyers and does not abuse the exit liqudity that surprisingly still exists but dwindles.
The DHF is not revenue. It is not profit. It is not customers paying us. It is Hive printing claims on itself and hoping there is still someone on the market willing to buy them.
The Ecency proposal itself says there is around 23.2M HBD available in the DHF and around 232k HBD possible daily funding. That sounds rich until you ask the ugly question:
Could that HBD actually be sold for 23 million real dollars?
Of course not. The “23M HBD” is a label. Its real value is whatever the market can absorb when funded teams sell HBD to pay rent, salaries, servers and fiat expenses.
At 5 cent HIVE, pretending the DHF is a giant war chest is dangerous. It is a big number inside a small, bleeding economy.
We are one protocol improvement away from bankruptcy
I respect the people keeping Hive alive. A blockchain that stops producing blocks is dead. Witnesses matter. Core development matters. APIs matter. HAF, Hivemind, Denser, node work, security and maintenance matter.
But we already proved Hive can handle far more activity than today.
During the Splinterlands peak, Hive handled millions of daily operations. We had real usage. We had hype. We had a much bigger market cap. Today we are around 50 times smaller than the 2021 peak.
So when the focus stays mostly on protocol improvements, I get angry. Do we still need to keep scaling? Do we want better performance for fewer users?
We are not one more hardfork away from demand.
We are not one more internal API rewrite away from users.
We are not one more elegant technical upgrade away from businesses caring.
We are one protocol improvement away from bankruptcy if the protocol work does not bring users, businesses, income, liquidity or real demand for HIVE and HBD.
The Hive roadmap still talks about mobile nodes, HAF enhancements, API modernization, Denser, lightweight accounts, smart contract prototypes and more. Some of that may be useful. Some of that may be necessary. I personally really want to run a node on my mobile phone.
But does this help Hive stop bleeding?
If the answer is vague then the work may be nice, however nice is too expensive right now.
Most DHF work should be hobby money now
This is the part I personally hate. This is the part teams may refuse to acknowledge because they don't want to or they effectively can not scale down to.
Hive is now at a hobby level of financing. That does not mean Hive is worthless. It means our economic reality is small.
With a few exceptions, if a project cannot be kept alive by a hobbyist in a garage, it probably does not deserve thousands of dollars from the DHF. For many things, a few hundred dollars should already be treated as meaningful support. We don't have a million users.
Recurring six-figure funding on a sub-30M market cap chain is insane.
Unless the project is essential infrastructure or clearly creates more value than it extracts.
And even essential infrastructure should be much smaller than it is today simply because we either scale down preemptively or we scale down because we've ran out of money. Either way we will scale down, that is the nature of current market conditions.
Every serious proposal should answer a few painful questions:
- If this gets funded, who is likely to sell the HBD?
- How much market pressure does that create?
- What outside income will replace DHF funding?
- What gets cut if HIVE goes another 50% down?
- Does Hive die without this, or do some people just lose a paid position?
- Is this a business or a community hobby?
That last question matters.
If it is a small community hobby, fine. Keep it cheap. Run it lean. Ask for hobby money.
If it is a serious business asking for 100k+ USD per year, then act like a business. Have revenue. Have customers. Have paid features. Have ads. Have a path to independence.
Do not ask holders to fund a business while refusing to make business decisions. You are asking us to fund your egoistic and ideological delusions. You are not above the morals you think you have. Make money.
Frontends need to drop the ego and the ideology
A frontend with no business model is not a business.
It is constant dump pressure.
It is dilution of our value through inflation.
I like our frontends. I use them. I voted for some of them. I supported proposals I still believe are too big, because I use the products and I see their value.
Keychain’s 2026 proposal asks for 540 HBD per day. They talk about reducing DHF dependency, swaps, EVM, partnerships, revenue and making this their last DHF proposal. Good. I support that direction and approved it, with my vote they are closer to reaching their requested funding. But 540 HBD per day is still a lot of money for a chain at this level. If that funding gets sold into the market, it hurts. I am afraid it hurts us more than the value it creates
Ecency’s proposal asks for 396 HBD per day. They list dev costs, servers, onboarding and infrastructure. I use Ecency. I support Ecency. I voted for it and it too is closer to funding because of my vote and my support. I also think that ask is huge and unreasonable for the sad economic reality we are in. I am also afraid it may hurt us more thant he value it creates.
This is the contradiction. I approve things because I use them and I want to believe they have value, while knowing that the funding itself may be shooting myself in the foot.
That is the cult follower part of me. That is the cult side of all of Hive, we behave sometimes almost like a religion.
The rational part says: if a frontend believes it is worth six figures (6 figures!!!) a year, it needs revenue. Ads. Premium accounts. Paid tools. Promoted posts. AI credits. Business accounts. Analytics. Subscriptions. Anything.
If the ideology is “no ads, no paid features, no business model,” then pay the team and infrastructure out of your own pocket. That ideology is expensive. Do not charge all holders for it.
Onboarding is still embarrassing
At Hive Open Days in Alicante, we spent almost 10 minutes helping one person create an account.
She already knew crypto. She was surrounded by experienced Hive users. Even then, the process was confusing. Frontends, Keychain, account creation, keys, flows, options, explanations. It was a mess. She almost gave up.
That is my empirical proof that all our “onboarding improvements” still failed at the most basic test.
Can a normal interested person create an account quickly, on their mobile phone, while standing next to people who know Hive?
In that case, barely. That person was very interested in Hive, 9 out of 10 people would have given up then and there.
And that was a friendly environment.
Now imagine a random user alone at home.
I will commit a blockchain sin, I will say a crypto heresy:
Want to make onboarding easy? Allow the user to create an account just with an e-mail and a password. Hold and manage their keys for them. Yes, it is unsafe, yes no one wants to do it because of the risks, but that is the functional difference between life and death of future onbaording attemps.
Also, frontends, stop worshiping raw activity numbers. A lot of on-chain activity is automation. Curation trails, copy voting, bots, scripts, farming, spam, “positive” automation and malicious automation. Do you think you are better than professional abusers? Think you can tell real organic from bot data? I am sure most of the "current traffic" after "discounting bots and spam" is still bots and spam, just fancier and uncaught.
Hivewatchers recently found abuse around free account creation. It is easy to onboard bots. It is still hard to onboard real humans.
So when proposals talk about users, accounts, views and activity, the numbers need to separate real people from automation as much as possible.
Otherwise we are funding dashboards that make us feel alive while the market keeps saying we are dying.
We don't want the dead internet theory to be synonymous with Hive. Make onboarding easier for humans and harder for bots. Do we need a phone 2FA to prevent bots? Probably. Would that hurt user anonimity? 100% would. How many users care about that? I do not know. Again we are at the crossroads between ideology and common sense.
HBD is not magic either
Hive’s own HBD page says HBD savings is currently 15% APR, voted by witnesses. It also says the haircut rule activates when the HBD debt ratio is greater than or equal to 30%, stops printing HBD and breaks the $1 peg.
The haircut rule may be good design. It may be much safer than Terra. I am not saying HBD is UST.
But people need to stop acting like the economy cannot break.
A controlled depeg is still a depeg. A safety mechanism still means someone gets hurt. If HIVE keeps falling, the system gets more fragile.
At the moment, public trackers have shown HBD trading far below $1 depending on liquidity and venue. Maybe arbitrage fixes it. Maybe it is temporary. Maybe it is thin markets.
But from outside, the story looks awful: HIVE at all-time lows, HBD under pressure, DHF still funding teams, and everyone explaining why this is fine.
It does not look fine.
The decision
If Hive wants to be a niche community, that is okay.
Really.
We can be a small club of friends. We can post, vote, meet, run witnesses, keep the chain alive, and pay for most things ourselves. There is dignity in that.
But then stop pretending we are building for a billion-dollar market cap and a million users.
A niche community cannot afford endless six-figure DHF funding. Witness rewards will shrink. Only witnesses with real income outside Hive will keep running things. Frontends will need to become cheap community projects. Most things will need to be run by hobbyists because they love Hive.
That is one path.
The other path is to admit we want growth and act accordingly.
That means businesses. Ads. Paid features. Better onboarding. Real products. External income. Revenue. Hard cuts. Smaller proposals. Clear metrics. Less ideology. Less marble tower. Less pretending that we are above economics.
Some important people on Hive talk from the top of a withering marble tower like our economy is immune to collapse. Like we are better than every failed crypto experiment because our intentions are cleaner.
We are not immune.
The chart says so.
The price says so.
The all-time low says so.
Every person who bought and held HIVE is now the punchline of a sad joke unless we change the ending.
I am still buying. I am still powering up. I am still here.
But I do not want to keep buying into a dream that refuses to wake up.
Hive at 5 cents should be treated as an emergency meeting.
Witnesses, whales, DHF-funded teams and frontends should put one question on the table:
Do we want to be a small hobby community, or do we want to be a serious economy?
Both answers are valid.
The current answer is the only one that makes no sense: hobby-level market cap, six-figure expectations, no business model, inflation-funded comfort, and another protocol improvement on the way down.
That cannot continue.
I'm on the blockchain every day... but I just don't see how the future of Hive survives. I can't say what problem that actually matters to a lot of people is being fixed by this blockchain, so unfortunately I don't think it's much more than a hobby.
I am absolutely fine with Hive being a hobby, I will stay here even if I have to restart my witness node (I am sure there will be a witness exodus if HIVE/HBD becomes worthless) and keep interacting and participating in events.
But that is to be the road we gown down to we need to pretend we can finance projects that want to have six figures like a business but don't want to be self sufficient like a business NOW. That goes for witnesses and funded projects.
Edit: As for the problem, none, I can't also think of one. The fact that our feeds are boring was never solved and that is something that the devs could tackle that brings more value than yet another scalability improvements. The chronological timeline type of feed is not attractive to most users. Some may value but because it is so hard for frontends to customize the feeds (snaps and eaves tried to do it with comments) makes we lose appeal as a social network
I have always thought that we have great potential in niche communities. I had high expectations for community breaks, but it truly disappointed me. Now with AI, we have the opportunity to create social networks for each community. Selling niche applications to administrators of large communities can be highly attractive. This is a new level of digital ownership and business model. Furthermore, with how cheap it is to store data on Hive, it is also one of our greatest advantages.
I made a niche app, and we are testing it before launching it. I am teaching my high school students to build them within the niches they are passionate about. I hope to scale this over the coming months.
I have always said that communities should be viewed as a business, complete with their own onboarding strategy and business model, but in my 9 years here, I have seen very few people with that vision. They only see income coming from the DHF or the reward pool.
That's one aspect that I meant when I posted that Hive needs to "de-Ponzify"(term I coined to describe a business model that require constant recruitment of new members and resources being poured in without returns just to keep in relative stability).
For that reason Hive must be used for real services instead of just circulating internally. The protocol already has several implementations that could allow Hive to actually operate like, for example, a real bank.
Another example of real world application:
In struggling economies(like Venezuela and some African countries) HBD is being used as actual stable currency the same way PIX is used in Brazil.
I do not think that more DeFi is exactly what we need right now but I get your point
This was a hell of a read.. some real home truths being told, all the dirty laundry on display, big time!!
I'm a relative newbie in the HIVE ecosystem, only really landed at the tail end of 2025 and have been using my Account as a new user experiment of sorts, focused on Blogging, Actifit, Splinterlands.. purposefully kept queries to a minimum, really wanted to see how easy the ecosystem was to navigate on my own two feet.
Its been a wild ride, coming from a Software Developer background I can really see and mostly understand what the ecosystem is trying to achieve, there are lots of things I like about HIVE but fully agree with some of your assessment.
All that being said I wish to end with positivity, I've run into many lovely people in this ecosystem, friendly, helpful, Actifit has actually had a positive impact on my health, and Splinterlands is great fun to play. I'm hoping to create a new Community on here soon and then push to start onboarding friends and wider circle now that I understand the onboarding mechanism requirements :)
The first bullet point is key. A tiny minority of users care about their private keys, matter of fact worse than that, most people store their keys unsecurely, they are better off having a trusted admin handling their keys securely for them. There is no argument, beyond the moral high ground some teams think they have, to not have a centralized key manager (boo, the ghost of centralization 👻)
Yet another user guide reminds me of this XKCD about standards:
https://xkcd.com/927/
Maybe we don't just need a new guide but we also need to NUKE and remove old ones so they don't confuse new people.
The search engine is probably difficult because Hive has awful search operations, it is the reason we can't have an algorithmic feed. The architectural decisions are showing its age.
I've seen AI do incredible things
In general I support AI aided development but we need to thread carefully not to shoot ourselves in the foot with code and feature quality. AI doesn't scale that well over long periods of time, it can start and produce stuff 800% faster but eventually, because of technical debt and feature creep, it drops to 20% and some researches even show it can SLOW DOWN DEVELOPMENT (if used properly caring for quality)
Well said :)
Have some !HBIT !PIZZA
At this level some emergency plan should have kicked in: IMMEDIATE STOP of any DHF funding and reduction of the HBD interest from 12% to 5% and reduction of the HP inflation from 4% to maybe 2%. Just until price recovers to >6c.
Were the top witnesses like @blocktrades and co. never foreseeing such a scenario? How unprofessional one can be? Every shit company has mitigation plans for SHTF-scenarios.
I would (apart from not supporting proposals) also NOT VOTE for any witness who is still POWERING DOWN and draining Hive like there is no tomorrow.
When things were going well it was easy to dismiss criticism as FUD, when things were going down it was easy to deny. When it is not falling anymore, because it became worthless, is when it will really hurt holders. The teams though will move on and find other projects to live off of.
And HBD recovers its peg.
Reality is soon catching up. They (all teams and individuals living off of inflation) need an emergency plan and at least to immediately publicly acknowledge it is a dire situation before they share their emergency plan.
I have lost count how many all time lows we have seen this year, I started buying again precisely to support Hive as it is reaching lower all time lows on a monthly basis. HBD is depegged by a huge margin. What are we doing? Asking for another 6 figures and making the blockchain even faster and more scalable?
Plus I'd consider not voting for witnesses that are supporting outrageous projects as if the DHF is real money. We do not have liqudity to finance so many 100k+ a year projects simultenously.
It cannot continue... but unfortunately what it feels like is that the ones with power to stop it don't really seem that interested in doing so. We keep seeing huge DHF payouts, we even opened the doors to rectroactive payments... no one in their right mind would invest in Hive nowadays. Like you, I spend a lot of time here, still enjoy playing games daily, but it's painful to see what we are becoming. And yes, we can be just a little community, but for how long? Right now, I would say: burn the DHF in its entirety, or almost all of it.
Thanks for another wake up call, they're in dire need. Cheers!
Are making enough money to pretend it is not a problem and pretend they are morally superior.
That exact proposal made me lose a bit of faith in Hive, look at how many top 20 witnesses supported that despite widespread community criticism
https://peakd.com/me/proposals/368
Some people are becoming what we thought Justin Sun would be for Steem.
We don't need to burn the DHF, it is useful for financing in terms of high liquidity and strong bull markets. The thing is, we may not live to see another bull market.
I will remove my votes on all DHF projects.
I am not investing more money into HIVE though.
It is time to have some major changes on this chain.
Maybe keep voting on the return proposal, this raises the bar. The problem remains though that we have no power, it would require a hardfork-level of coordination to defund 6 figure projects and to rotate the top 20 witnesses list.
You said a lot here, @igormuba, I'm going to respond as I think up points...
Let's start with market fundamentals for virtually anything: When demand is higher than supply, prices rise. When supply is greater than demand, prices fall. What is the compelling reason to buy and hold Hive? 15-second "elevator speech" version.
You've got 15 seconds. Go!
Let's just say we're pitching this to your average blogger/vlogger, or "refugee" who's sick and tired of the vacuousness of FB/Insta/TikTok and wants a venue with more "meat on its bones."
It doesn't matter how much people keep polishing the code, building scaling and various technical aspects of Hive. The analogy I have been using for years is that it doesn't matter that you've build the world's greatest sports car... if you're living in a remote village with no paved roads and nobody knows about you.
I'm approaching my 10th year here, but also approaching my 10th year of pointing out that we simply cannot afford to just be "Decentralized Crypto Blockchainiacs" as if that's the magic unicorn dust that makes a success. Nobody cares. "Decentralization" remains meaningless to 90-95% of the population. "Censorship resistant" might carry slightly more depth.
Thinking about, that situation from Alicante you describe... I have repeatedly suggested "Light" accounts as a way to reduce the barriers to entry here. Your basic "sign up with Google/Facebook" that gives you access to everything except financial features. You start with a 25HP "loan" (to minimize RC issues) which can be a delegation from a DHF sponsored account that goes away when the acount actually reaches 25HP. You can even watch your rewards build in your account... but you can't touch it until you get your actual keys, which requires you to commit to a full account. Light accounts come with the additional proviso that if a "light" account goes dormant for more than 6 or 12 or 24 months (whatever) whatever Hive is there is automatically burned. Not only would it facilitate entry; these signups could serve as somewhat of an inflation reducer.
As for the DHF... great idea, but I believe it should be contingent on several things, including "no business plan showing revenue, no funding" and an additional requirement that that some part of the funding (10%? 20%?) MUST be used for external marketing of the final product. In other words... time to emphasize projects that offer utility to people outside the walls of Hive.
Along with that, don't forget that you're basically asking for a "grant." Do you have ANY idea of how much detail and documentation goes into a conventional grant proposal? And how much reporting is required to account for where and how the funding is being used? Grants aren't just a magic cash dispenser!
Lastly, we also need to let go of (at least in part) this myopic thinking that somehow "Hive's built in user base" is all that's needed for a DHF funded project to become successful. Sorry... WRONG. Go pitch your show outside Hive and see if anyone cares. If they don't, maybe you shouldn't be asking for money.
And yes, I am well aware that maintaining basic infrastructure matters. Could be the DHF needs to be segmented into discrete allocations for different types of projects.
Final thought about the "Ponzi" question. Hive isn't really a Ponzi, in much the same way as some of the Network Marketing programs I was familiar with 30-40 years ago weren't Ponzis. The problem tended to be an overemphasis on selling the program rather than selling the products. We need to start pitching the tangible benefits of Hive, not just Hive the concept. People invest in stuff they can USE, not just cool ideas.
To deponzify our economy we need to stop thinking about what people would invest in and start to think what would people pay for
Great post on your views on what is going wrong. totally agree with your sentiments. I have learnt a lot over the last year and no longer support or vote for any proposal,(apart from worldmappin, which are very transparent) the killer for me was some individual wanting support to buy a fucking computer.
I do see a lot of posts about this little app that little app, mostly about checking stats, personal and of others, but seriously, what benefit is that for the Hive? What value does it bring? What does it cost!
I think I know exactly what little app about checking stats you refer to LOL
The little projects are clearly AI made and add little to no value, but hey, if Hive users want to experiment, play, and create useless stuff WITHOUT the DHF funds go for it, let them have fun and engage (although some of them need a reality shock based on how they right), they are not asking for anything in return, at least not yet...
Great post! Your post has been curated from Ecency.
Un crudo análisis,
Como bien dices, cuando una blockchain toca un mínimo histórico, ya no estamos ante simple ruido de mercado, o volatilidad común; estamos ante una señal de alarma que afecta el bolsillo de absolutamente todos los que han creído y mantenido su apuesta aquí. Seguir operando bajo la mentalidad de cuando HIVE valía 3 dólares es una desconexión peligrosa con nuestra realidad económica actual. Algo desalentador, para los que entramos hace poco con una ilusión.
I think you hit the nail on "only those with real income OUTSIDE hive" can sustain.
Because of the current situation and a lot are literally having trouble obtaining income outside HIVE is the pivot that will bankrupt it.
I am trying to help by encouraging people to spend their HBD with my new ebook launch. However I can, of course i am not a millionaire myself.
If there are any entrepreneur could to do the same maybe there will be less bleeding outword
A decade ago, TeamMalaysia tried to do that. But with such a tiny community trying to do while others dunping at all time high but not buying at all time low, that happens
is awful see hive drop down a lot :(
IF we want to see broader adoption the power has to spread out.
Nobody buys in when the price to power ratio is out of whack.
What that price is, I don't know, but we have to be getting close to it.
What do you mean by power spreading out? Do you mean HP and the centralization we have on some large holders?
What would the "price to power ratio" mean? Trying to understand your point
Que calidad de contenido @igormuba! Me gustó mucho lo que compartiste. Vote y comento para dar visibilidad. Seguí así!
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@urielkinnear(1/5) tipped @igormuba
Please vote for pizza.witness!