Over the past years, the Hive ecosystem has demonstrated resilience, creativity, and an impressive capacity for independent initiative. However, these same strengths have also highlighted an increasingly damaging structural weakness: a pattern of repeated work, fragmented development efforts, and a lack of any serious strategic collaboration across the community. This is not simply an efficiency concern, it is also an economic one, and increasingly, a systemic one.
This has over the years become a serious economic liability for Hive that might not be as openly visible as some other wasteful expenditure of DHF funding.
A significant portion of development on Hive operates in isolation, with teams recreating tools, frameworks and services with little awareness of similar/same parallel work being done elsewhere. Even worse, completely disregarding it. The result is predictable: duplicated work, inconsistent standards, and dilution of already limited resources into redundant implementations that often struggle to gain traction or long-term users.
Compounding this issue is the prevailing reliance on the Decentralized Hive Fund as the primary, often the only, business model. Too many initiatives begin not with a market need, a sustainable revenue plan, or cross-project consultation, but with one question: What can I propose to the DHF?
In this environment the incentives do not lead to building sustainable, economically relevant products but rather lead towards producing self-justified, low-impact projects designed primarily to secure funding from the HIVE DHF.
This has consequences which are hard to ignore:
- Developers build tools without validating whether anyone actually needs them.
- Projects launch without discussing integrations, interoperability, or economic impact with existing teams.
- Funding is allocated to initiatives that show limited usage or no real world usage at all.
- Value creation becomes secondary to merely qualifying for DHF funding.
When no one is accountable for aligning efforts, and when communication across the development community is optional rather than crucial, we pay more, we gain less, and we repeat the cycle.
If we want to see Hive grow beyond a series of well-intentioned but disconnected micro-projects, we need to reconsider how development is structured. We need an overarching strategy that aligns incentives, reduces duplication, and places development under a coordinated framework. This is not about centralizing control it is about establishing priorities, and ensuring that DHF spending goes toward outcomes with measurable impact!
Without coordination, developers will continue producing unused tools, repeating work that already exists, and burning through resources that could be directed toward efforts with actual economic relevance. With coordination, the community can identify true needs, pool expertise, consolidate talent, assess economic viability, and build complementary systems that reinforce each other rather than compete for relevance and foolishly expend resources.
Double spending isn’t only a blockchain threat, it’s what we do to the DHF every time we pay for duplicate work because no one coordinates.
Hive’s strength has always been its decentralization and independence. But decentralization without communication becomes fragmentation, and independence without strategy creates waste.
We need a development culture where collaboration is enforced by expectation and value creation is standard!
Build better funnels,...
Maybe a dev link in various places.
Very well said.
Somehow the incentives seem backwards. You will be paid more if you find more work for yourself. If you coordinate with others well and you avoid duplicate work and you build tools and processes that are a part of a common community-wide development, ultimately everyone will have less work, meaning less funds from the DHF. Does this seem to be the case?
Absolutely is the case. It has been happening for years now, and will likely continue to happen into the future unless it gets stopped. A notable example is proposal #361 which is asking for Hive funds to redo already developed work.
The biggest issue we came across was not having a place to get support during development. In the end a couple of devs helped us (thank you @gerber and Rishi) and without them we would not have been able to create anything on HIVE.
Ever since then we have worked, as you say, in isolation and although we sometimes get contacted about being part of a marketing effort HIVE is just a technology we use but don't feel part of.
We did try to get DHF funding once and failed but that ended up being a good thing as it drove us to think about how we could make Rising Star self sustainable.
HIVE provides curation rewards and 15% on HBD savings. It is possible to use this to build financial resilience and although we are not there yet we are well on the way to using these to cover all our costs.
When you start a company you expect to lose money for the first few years and you have a business plan that factors this in. Developing on HIVE should be no different. Maybe the DHF fund should have two different flavours: funding core projects and providing loans to others where the repayment starts low but increases over time?
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hive needs fresh new users but we also need to look outside more. other dpos chains like l1 tezos + l2 etherlink are interesting to me. maybe we need to figure out why the market is putting so much money into them and not hive. yes valueplan seems to be spending a lot. but i also see it as the only opportunity that's gonna open hive to the outside world (starting with evm compatibility and btc-hbd pool).
or one look at defillama would have you knowing that there's 100s of pools that are at around the same 15~20% apr range that's getting way more attention. to me hive's biggest problem is isolation + incest of ideas. we need more focus on what makes hive a no brainer for newbies. and by newbies i mean both crypto newbies + people from other chains.
Hive needs discussion forums and wiki pages. Most projects rely on discord and that is just a chat room unless the forum mode is used. There is no way on hive to have discussions and ask questions in a organized way as blogs do not allow the level of communication that forums provide.
The problem is there are zero incentives for projects to use it in the first place. We have chat rooms, we have wikis, we have contact pages, it all hasn't changed anything since the projects can just choose to not engage with one another. The solution is the community as a whole needs to proactively enforce a set of requirements on projects by collectively putting pressure against those who do not follow such requirements. Hive has the most powerful form of governance: community. However, just like democratic governments, communities need to actively pushback against bad actions
Hi Vaultec, hope you are well.
The core problem is a decentralised system can't function when it has such deep problems as a dominant minority and a lack of any centralised planning or goal setting.
My long comment above provided a lot of steps we could introduce to address those issues and got shot down by negativity, so the prospects of improving things seem as remote as ever...
Isn't that the chain? We can discussions right here. Just keep replying.
Yep exactly, all the tools are at hand they simply need to be used appropriately.
These are discussion threads on blog pages but the communities are not designed in a way where we can continue discussions and build communities here on hive. Forums have subgroups within each group and are organized in a way that is easy to follow and become a community as most hive projects are using discord as their main communication tool.
We had a forum, nobody used it.
These three provide a good start:
There are times that I could no longer distinguish the difference between decentralization and chaos. One leads to waste, and the other should motivate initiative and collaboration from the community.
There's a lot of redundancy in decentralization. I can understand that. What I don't understand, like you, is why there isn't more collaboration between different teams, better usage of the open-source aspect that usually associates with decentralization. And yes, a strategy gives one or a few directions where the energy should be focused, rather than being sometimes completely random.
Well said!
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The concept of decentralization seems to be a confusing mess for a lot of minds, especially when combined with the concept of community.
Every individual entity has the capacity to form a community around its offerings. All of those communities together make up one decentralized community that no individual entity can claim to represent. That part confuses people, leading to talk without action, a plethora of animosity, and at times far too much meddling.
I can nearly guarantee the confusion has intensified after reading a paragraph like mine above, and some individuals already want to blame the system for those problems. As a result, even the simple act of communicating will have deteriorated into nothingness, because there is no overarching system (and never will be).
I think once people can grasp what it means to be a decentralized community, they'll start building roads and begin trade. Until then, expect more of the same.