Gonna be honest here... I'm pretty skeptical of this proposal. 108,625 HBD is a substantial amount of money, and looking through the projects being funded, I have some questions.
Vylor is a commercial AI personal finance app with paid PRO subscriptions. Why is the DHF subsidising development of a private commercial product? Integrating Hive balances and payments doesn't automatically justify funding the broader application.
Then there's Hive Freelance, an Upwork-style marketplace, Hive Chameleon, a 3D multiplayer game, LINGO, a Wordle clone with HBD rewards (I already built a significant popular Wordle clone called Hiveword), HiveTrivia and HiveLore. Are these really the best uses of community funds? What evidence is there of demand, adoption or measurable value being returned to Hive?
I can absolutely get behind funding HAF improvements, infrastructure, APIs and work that benefits the entire ecosystem. But bundling those alongside commercial products, games and experiments makes it difficult to know what we're actually paying for. This seems all over the place. People can't be expected to fund things with minimal return.
And we're in 2026. AI has fundamentally changed software development productivity. As a developer myself, I'm delivering considerably more with less effort than I was even 12 months ago. Surely that should be reflected in the cost and output of these proposals?
Where's the project-by-project budget? How many development hours are being funded? What are the measurable deliverables? Who owns the commercial products and who benefits financially if they succeed?
I'm not suggesting the team hasn't done valuable work, but previous contributions shouldn't automatically justify another 108k HBD without proper scrutiny.
The DHF should be funding measurable value for Hive, not becoming a general-purpose development budget for someone's portfolio of apps.
Thanks for your feedback and for reading our proposal closely. Here are answers to each point.
What the money pays for. Most of it goes to Hive infrastructure. Of the year's output, 434 merged MRs went into 10 core Hive repos: two new HAF apps (haf_stats and haf_fyp) that now ship in the standard haf_api_node release, the Block Explorer's analytics, and fixes and endpoints in Balance Tracker, HAF Block Explorer, Hivemind, HiveSense and HAF. PeakD serves haf_fyp's ranking to its readers today. The ask splits as 77% development, 18% outreach and contest payouts (which go straight back to Hive writers in HIVE), and 5% for the two public HAF API nodes we run.
Vylor. It's mcfarhat's own app, and yes, it is commercial, by design. It's one of our attempts to build income outside the DHF, so that over time we rely less on DHF funding. It's also built around Hive: users can hold HIVE/HBD balances, pay for PRO in HIVE/HBD and post milestones on-chain, and it puts Hive in front of people using an ordinary finance app.
The cohort apps (Hive Freelance, LINGO, HiveLore, Hive Chameleon). These came from a summer program that brought new developers to build on Hive, with mentoring from our team. They're open source and none has launched yet, which the post says. So there's no adoption data to show yet. What Hive got so far is developers who learned to build on it. The aim for next year is to launch them, and they should be judged on adoption then. Hiveword is a fair comparison for LINGO, and we'd happily talk with you about it.
AI and productivity. We use AI tools heavily. That's part of how a small team got 434 MRs and two production HAF apps out in a year, while only being funded for half of it. It's also reflected in the ask, which is 34% lower than our last proposal's adjusted rate.
Measurable deliverables. Proposal #2 set out a 9-item roadmap, and 8 of those items are done and live; the table in the post links each one (only HAF_CHAT wasn't started). The plans for the coming year are listed project by project in the post, and every piece of work lands in public repos, so progress can be checked as it happens.
Who owns what. HAF apps and backend work: hive/* GitLab repos, owned by Hive. hdev-core apps and Actifit: public GitHub repos. Vylor: mcfarhat's.
Lastly, DHF funding is paid daily and votes can be removed at any time. If we stop delivering, stakeholders can pull support the next day, and we'd expect that. Every MR and repo is linked in the post, so the work can be checked as we go.