For years, Ecency has worked to give the Hive community a fast, reliable and feature rich way to explore, create and earn on the blockchain. Behind the app you use every day is a large amount of infrastructure: web servers in multiple regions, a full Hive node, image hosting, search, notifications and more. All of it costs real money every month.
We want to be transparent with you about where we stand.
The funding reality
Our Hive proposal is currently not funded. Together with app revenue that does not fully cover our operating costs, this leaves us with a growing monthly shortfall. We have kept everything running by absorbing the difference ourselves, but that is not sustainable for much longer.
Rather than let quality quietly slip or put the whole service at risk, we are making deliberate, responsible decisions about what we keep and what we can no longer afford. The first priority in every one of these decisions is keeping the main Ecency app online and working for everyone.
What we are changing now
Shutting down our dedicated Hive node. Ecency has run its own full Hive node (hapi.ecency.com) to power the app quickly and reliably and to give back to the ecosystem as a public API endpoint that anyone could use. Running a full node is one of our most expensive line items. We are shutting it down and moving fully to public Hive API nodes, the same shared infrastructure many other apps rely on.
To do this without hurting your experience, we rebuilt how the app talks to Hive nodes. It now detects slow or rate limited nodes and routes around them automatically, in real time, so a bad node no longer slows you down. Most of you should notice no difference. If you or your application were pointing to hapi.ecency.com directly, please switch to another public node.
Retiring our Asia web server. Ecency ran regional web servers so pages load quickly close to you. We are retiring the Asia server and visitors in Asia and Oceania are now served from our European and US servers. Thanks to caching at the network edge, most pages stay fast. Some first time page loads in that region may be slightly slower than before.
What may come next
We want to be honest with you: if funding does not improve, these will not be the last changes. The services most at risk, roughly in the order we would be forced to consider them, are:
Image hosting. Storing and serving the millions of images across Hive is one of our largest ongoing costs in both storage and bandwidth. Your images are safe and already proxied by along with our own images.ecency.com for now, we will think of ways to decomisionning step by step/safely.
images.hive.blog / http://images.hive.blogSearch. Full text search across posts and accounts.
Other supporting services. Parts of notifications, analytics and background processing.
If we reach that point, our commitment is simple. We will reduce everything else before we let the core Ecency website and app go offline. Keeping the front door open for the community comes first.
How you can help
Ecency is powered by this community and the community can keep it strong:
Support the Ecency proposal. Voting for our Hive proposal is the single most impactful thing you can do. https://ecency.com/proposals/379
Use the paid features you value. Boosting posts, promotions, buying and spending Points and Premium all directly fund operations.
Delegate Hive Power to @ecency to strengthen the account and its rewards.
Spread the word. Invite others, share your work and help grow the community that sustains all of this.
We are not going anywhere
None of this changes our commitment to Hive or to you. We are working hard to make every remaining dollar go further and to keep Ecency fast and dependable even on a leaner setup. We would much rather tell you honestly what we are facing than pretend everything is fine.
Thank you for being part of Ecency. With your support, we will keep building.
Status: https://status.ecency.com
Transparency: https://trust.ecency.com
The Ecency Team
Thank you for the honest and transparent update. Keeping a platform running requires tremendous effort, and it's refreshing to see the community informed about both the challenges and the decisions being made. Open communication builds trust and helps users better understand the importance of sustainable funding and service improvements. Wishing the Ecency team continued strength, wisdom, and success as you navigate these changes and continue providing a valuable home for creators and readers across the Hive ecosystem. 🚀🌿👏
Ecency still paying out 100%? Wouldn't it be better to cut that down to 95% or something and use the last 5% to help pay for stuff?
Also. Mandatory beneficiary for Image posts and video posts, to help pay for the servers.
Peakd talked about this aswell.
Maybe making it cost a little bit to either upload images or if someone wants to upload more than 5 images pr post.
I honestly think beneficiary should be a requirement for using image server.
That would also be a solution!
What about ads in website or app ? Will that help !
Ads won’t help, as we mentioned to others many times, revenue from ads will be very tiny and it won’t be worth the bad UX and privacy violations that comes with it.
Ohk , got it. Thanks for the reply. I hope the proposal will pass soon. Good luck 🤞 🍀
I hope you guys find new sources of revenue. There are thousands of users, maybe a cheap enough subscription that comes with some delegation and/or curation revenue sharing and some badge and maybe a few more perks and benefits?
HIVE is still too fragile and low to fund anything with the DHF ATM, but hopefully you guys can figure something out to not rely on the DHF. Or just hang on until HIVE recovers strongly and healthy so the DHF fund won't shoot ourselves in the foot.
We actually already offer most of those things through our Premium perks - delegation, additional features, badges and other benefits. The challenge isn’t so much coming up with ideas; it’s convincing enough people to pay. What would you pay for?
Our costs also aren’t just about maintaining and developing the apps. A significant portion goes toward running infrastructure that benefits the Hive ecosystem by making it more resilient and decentralized.
Without funding, the practical response is to gradually shut down that infrastructure and reduce operations to only what we can sustain ourselves. If it eventually no longer makes economic sense, we’ll continue to keep the code open source so the community can run the stack itself if it chooses.
I think many people don’t yet realize what losing infrastructure means because the impact isn’t immediate. Things keep working… until they don’t. It’s a gradual decline rather than a single event.
Ultimately, the community decides what it wants to fund and preserve and we’ll adapt accordingly while continuing to look for sustainable ways forward.
Good question. I don't know what I would pay for. I know I can buy points but beyond promoting posts I don't know what else I could use them for. If there are other paid features I don't know about.
Maybe that is an idea for future posts, what can purchased and the benefits of buying and/or subscribing?