Who really decides what the DHF funds? A humble question from a small bee 🐝

Who really decides what the DHF funds?

I'm a counting bee. I don't run a big project, I don't ask the DHF for anything, and I don't have the stake to change any vote. I only read the chain and count.

Today I counted the DHF, and I came out with a question I can't answer on my own. So I'm asking you, with respect for everyone involved.

What the chain says today

Data read on 10 November 2026, straight from the blockchain (proposals, votes, accounts and the payments of the treasury).

The treasury holds 23,270,000 HBD. Twenty-three million.
Only 3 proposals are funded right now, for a total of 835 HBD a day (about 305,000 HBD a year).
To be funded, a proposal needs more votes than the Return Proposal, which today sits at about 48.5M HP.

Proposal	HBD/day	Votes (M HP)	Funded
Keychain 2026	540	79.5	✅
Ecency	100	57.6	✅
Worldmappin 2.0	195	51.6	✅
Return Proposal (the bar)	–	48.5	–
Public HAF / HafSQL	298	44.0	❌
HiveSQL	135	34.8	❌
HiveBuzz	150	28.6	❌
PeakD	150	19.3	❌
Core development, year 7	150	18.0	❌
Magi Network	900	12.0	❌
Hive Analytics	101	10.8	❌
Hivewatchers	40	1.7	❌

The three funded proposals, start to finish

Proposal	HBD/day	Funding period	Total requested	Still to be paid (from 10 Nov)
Keychain 2026	540	15 May 2026 → 15 May 2027	197,100 HBD	~100,100 HBD
Worldmappin 2.0	195	16 Jun 2025 → 16 Jun 2027	142,350 HBD	~42,400 HBD
Ecency	100	22 Jun 2026 → 22 Jul 2027	39,500 HBD	~25,400 HBD
Total	835		378,950 HBD	~167,900 HBD

_{"Still to be paid" assumes each proposal stays above the bar until its end date. Totals are daily pay × days of the full period.}

So, if nothing changes, the DHF will pay out about 168,000 HBD more for the approved proposals: less than 1% of the 23.27M HBD sitting in the treasury.

Why the bar is high, and why that's understandable

HIVE has had a very hard year on price. Every HBD paid by the DHF can become new HIVE, so the large stakeholders who raised the bar have a clear and fair reason: protect everyone from dilution.

I respect that. They have the most at stake, and they carry the biggest risk.

The part I can't stop counting

When I look at who the votes come from, the picture gets very concentrated:

One single account carries about 33M HP of governance weight, roughly half its own and half delegated to it by others through proxy. All three funded proposals have its vote. Without it, none of them would pass the bar.
Five accounts make up 41% of the weight that holds the bar up.
On the other side, thousands of small accounts vote: almost 2,000 for Keychain, over 1,300 for Ecency, over 1,000 for PeakD. PeakD has the most spread-out support of all (its top five voters are only 21% of its weight), and it's not funded.

Nobody here is doing anything wrong. Voting with your stake is exactly how the system was designed. But it leaves me with a question.

Thousands of voices. How much do they weigh?

The humble question

Is this still a decentralized fund, or in practice do a handful of accounts decide what lives and what doesn't?

And a second one, for the small bees:

What should the thousands of users who want to support infrastructure like core development, PeakD, HiveSQL or the public HAF database do, when their combined votes barely move the needle?

With 23 million HBD in the treasury, it's hard to explain to a newcomer that core development of the chain, asking 150 HBD a day, stays out.

What's already out there

To be fair, the funded teams do report in public:

Keychain posts regular development updates, and in March published a DHF and Transparency Update. Its latest: The Multichain Update is Here (10 Nov).
Ecency publishes release notes for every version, such as Ecency Web 4.4.3 and Ecency Mobile 3.5.9.
Worldmappin publishes a daily Travel Digest, now past # 3,000.

And the conversation about the DHF has already started too. A few posts worth reading:

What Hive is already saying about the DHF 🗣️

_{Research supervised by Ant and assisted by AI: I read the main DHF posts of the last months and their comment threads (spam and bots excluded), then summarized them. If I misread anyone, please tell me and I'll fix it.}

The posts

@igormuba's all-time low post is the heart of the debate, with dozens of comments. His point: the DHF is not free money, every HBD paid dilutes holders, and 23M HBD is "a big number inside a small economy". His protocol PR proposes cutting DHF payouts automatically when the chain itself slows down HBD printing.
@howo built Gopherd, a second independent client that produced its first real block on Hive. He worked unfunded for three months and halved his proposal to 150 HBD a day. The comments are all appreciation.
@blanchy read the 2026 code history of Keychain, Ecency and PeakD: the teams are really working, and he calls them "the best Hive has to offer". Keychain replied openly about its pace and its plan to become sustainable without the DHF.
@spacecop counted every DHF payment since 2019, and @dalz explained where the fund's money comes from.

The main views I found

Cut or pause the DHF. The largest group in the comments, mostly small and mid-sized accounts: fund only critical infrastructure, or stop everything until the price recovers.
The system works as designed. @blocktrades explained this clearly: Hive is stake-weighted by design. Anyone who wants less spending can stop voting proposals or vote the Return Proposal, and changing the rules because we dislike a result would take away rights stakeholders paid for. He also said he's not a fan of stake-weighted systems in general, but changing an existing one is a different matter. That's a fair and honest position, and this post doesn't dispute it.
"Can, but won't?" Others replied that the question isn't whether big stakeholders can stop the spending, but whether they want to, and that matching that weight would cost millions of HIVE.
Let's verify. @blanchy, @spacecop and @jza asked for open data. @jza even asked to "see the votes taking out the whales", to check whether smaller accounts want something different. This post is a first, small attempt to answer him. Ecency also publishes its costs openly.
Funded teams adapting. Lower asks (@howo, Ecency), and plans to earn outside the DHF (Keychain).
The real problem is onboarding. Several long-time users think nothing changes until joining Hive gets much easier.

What I take from it: the conversation is alive, passionate and mostly constructive. The rules give the final word to stake, and many smaller voices are asking to be heard inside those rules.

A few ideas, offered with respect

One simple place for the reports. They exist, but they're scattered across blogs. A short, shared format (what was promised, what was delivered, what it cost) would let every voter, big or small, compare proposals at a glance.
Infrastructure first: core, databases and front-ends before projects on a single topic.
Small stakeholders: vote directly, or choose your proxy with care. A proxy is your voice: make sure it speaks for you.
Keep the conversation going, and bring the big holders into it. Maybe they see risks the rest of us don't. I'd really like to hear them.

A small personal note 🐝

Since I'm counting, I counted myself too: 19 of the last 20 posts on @hive3 and the only report published so far by @beecounter received downvotes. Downvotes are part of Hive, and everyone is free to use them. I just hope they came for reasons I can learn from, and not because some analyses are uncomfortable to read. If something I wrote was wrong or unfair, telling me in a comment helps me much more than a flag.

Please, step in 💬

I'm not asking anyone to change their vote. I'm asking to understand.

I read these numbers as carefully as I could, but a counting bee can still misread a proxy, a vote or the reason behind a choice. If something here is wrong or badly interpreted, I apologize in advance, and I'd be grateful if you pointed it out in the comments. I'll correct the post and thank you openly.

And whether you hold millions of HP or just a few, your view is welcome: why you vote the way you do, what you think the DHF should fund, what you'd change. The comments are open to everyone, and I'll answer every one.

Ant · The Hive Tree 🌳

_{Disclaimer. This post took me more than two hours of work, plus quite a few hours of thinking it over before I even started. I used AI to pull the data from the chain, read through the posts and comments, and help me with the English. I chose the questions, checked the numbers and the tone, decided what to include and what to leave out, and I take full responsibility for every line. This is not financial advice, and it is not an accusation against anyone: it's a question, asked in good faith. If you spot an error, tell me and I'll correct it. Ant 🐝}

_{Method: data from database_api.list_proposals, list_proposal_votes, condenser_api.get_accounts and the payment history of the treasury, 10 Nov 2026. Vote weight = own HP + HP received via proxy. My totals match the chain's within 1%.}

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