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.
