How much has this chain actually paid for content since it stopped being Steem?
Not an estimate. Every comment_reward operation Hive has emitted from block 41,818,753, the first block it produced on its own on 20 March 2020, through 15 August 2026. That is 9,865,086 payouts, each one carrying the chain's own valuation of a post or a comment at the moment it settled, plus the split between the author, the curators who voted on it and any beneficiary the post named.
48,380,264 HBD in total. Authors kept 18,128,376, curators took 24,011,537 and beneficiary accounts took 6,240,352. That last column is lopsided: 70% of it is one market operation rather than apps or communities, which is a whole post of its own later in the series.
The halves
Every payout splits in two when it settles. One half is the author's, one half belongs to whoever voted. Measured across the whole period it comes out at 50.4% on the author side against 49.6% for curators. Beneficiaries are not a third slice taken off the top, they come out of the author's half, which is why the author column and the curator column move together no matter what the price is doing.
| Year | Authors | Curators | Beneficiaries | Total HBD | Payouts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 1,588,336 | 1,562,659 | 90,804 | 3,241,798 | 1,054,844 |
| 2021 | 4,948,790 | 5,801,021 | 1,020,029 | 11,769,841 | 1,779,565 |
| 2022 | 4,800,819 | 6,440,176 | 1,670,818 | 12,911,813 | 1,997,656 |
| 2023 | 2,599,212 | 3,828,814 | 1,246,779 | 7,674,804 | 1,774,072 |
| 2024 | 2,110,230 | 3,178,696 | 1,081,136 | 6,370,062 | 1,488,514 |
| 2025 | 1,775,229 | 2,710,323 | 945,400 | 5,430,952 | 1,341,654 |
| 2026 to 15 Aug | 305,759 | 489,848 | 185,387 | 980,994 | 428,781 |
The price does the talking
The chain never pays in dollars. It pays out a nearly constant number of tokens and lets the price feed decide what they are worth that day. Authors have been paid between 7.3M and 8.8M HIVE in every full year since the fork. The column that moves is the one next to it.
| Year | HIVE paid to authors | Worth in HBD | Average price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 7,898,826 | 1,588,336 | 0.201 |
| 2021 | 8,837,079 | 4,948,790 | 0.560 |
| 2022 | 7,323,974 | 4,800,819 | 0.655 |
| 2023 | 7,313,614 | 2,599,212 | 0.355 |
| 2024 | 7,785,284 | 2,110,230 | 0.271 |
| 2025 | 7,893,824 | 1,775,229 | 0.225 |
| 2026 to 15 Aug | 4,862,256 | 305,759 | 0.063 |
Over this period the feed price implied by the chain's own payouts went from 0.177 HBD per HIVE on 2020-03-20 to 0.039 on 2026-08-15.
What this leaves out
The DHF is a separate pot and I went through it in an earlier post. Second layer tokens like LEO or POB run their own pools and never touch Hive's reward pool, so none of that is in here. Tips, delegations, subscriptions and anything agreed off chain are invisible to these operations and are not counted either.
Built from Hive chain data on 16 August 2026 · blocks 41,818,753 to 109,070,000 · figures in HBD at payout time
Thanks for pulling this information, make us more aware of how much waste there is on the Hive ecosystem.
We have creator economy page showing similar data for each quarter... Good analysis, DHF and now content, looks like more than 3x reward was distributed via content creation.
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