Proposal type: Operational / GTM, Growth, Marketing / Coding and Development
Principal: @crimsonclad
Funding recipient: @cczswap
Amount requested: 90,000 HBD (lump sum)
Coverage period: ~2020–2026 (Hive inception to present)
Who I Am and What I Do
At this point in time, I think it’s fair to say that most of you know me. For those who I’ve managed to miss: I'm @crimsonclad, and I've been one of the more consistent back and foreground presences in this ecosystem for the better part of a decade! There are varying opinions on this, I have no doubt. But, alongside many other infamous faces or identities, I am pretty proud to have become someone well known for supporting Hive and our community in every possible capacity, including essentially full time work. Not because anyone hired me, but because I just kept showing up hourly and made myself useful to everyone possible and to the day to day of the ecosystem, until it now has become a job in all but definition. I’m going to point out now that this is a LONG post, both because I’m due for one but also because I’m also verbose and any viable proposal made should lay out as much information as absolutely possible.
My background is in graphic design, web development, education, and project management. It’s pretty hard to create a relevant shortlist of what I’m best at, since over the years I’ve adapted heavily to meet new challenges and it’s led to some pretty crazy scope creep in terms of job description. In my meatsack professional career, I help guide an educational provider to build strong brand and products, refine and convey the messaging, get into the code and infra myself and build out digital products from idea to final deployment, the websites, materials and copy that do both the selling and fulfillment, and then be the one to get out into the world to show it all off, teach about it, or meet the critics and collect the feedback.
All that experience has been pretty indispensable for me in finding ways to pick up tasks around Hive. Day to day that means exchange and tech/swap/DEX relationships, cross-chain bizdev, conference speaking and coordination, dapp liaison work, putting in time to social media whenever possible, and generally a wide operational catch-all that covers whatever the ecosystem needs that nobody else is handling that week. I’ve earned my knowledge and my passion; I started mid-2017 and began immediately learning about the concepts and code. I've been a top 20 consensus block producer, run years of educational (and also fun and irreverent) live stream, video and radio programming, and have been the person setting up, living at, and tearing down the conference booth, in the 2am call with an overseas exchange team solving problems, or pasting receipts into a spreadsheet after providing my personal credit cards for ecosystem use so my entire workflow is tracked by everyone. That’s been for the full life of this chain, from the very first minutes of conception. I’ve done everything from building and leading communities, backing curation, helping develop code, building websites and scripts, to paying out of pocket for servers to run bots I’ve custom written that now protect upwards of 40 Hive related discords.
If I can take it on and do it well so that other people can take Hive and make it fly, I want to do it.
There's a specific category of work within all of that which is worth naming clearly, because it tends to be invisible until it isn't there. One of the largest contentions about my time here is that I have not “valued” it, and don’t do a good job bragging up on it. Exchanges, spaces, conference keynotes, other chains, financial services, companies, press, internal coordination: these relationships require someone who is identifiable, accountable, and consistently reachable. We’re in a weird time now where anon is sort of becoming okay, but KYC is also easily faked, and the only thing that matters to the crypto world is consistency: proof of work and proof of stake in human form. History and reputation over time combined with the proven ability to put skills, funds, time, and passion in and let it grow over years; in this case, just shy of a full decade.
I’ve become someone who can be held to commitments, followed up with, and trusted to speak to a position without going rogue. It has become very distinct from the organic community advocacy that makes Hive genuinely special— we are still here and strong because the bulk of our community is comprised of people representing Hive in their own way, and that's one of its superpowers. What I've been doing is same same but different: showing up as a consistent, accountable external contact point for relationships that require one, because without that, those relationships don't form or don't hold. It's the closest thing Hive has had to a head of partnerships or external relations. It's been entirely unfunded and self-directed, while still essentially remaining accountable to our coredevs, community members, and dapp builders. After many years of consideration, and a lot of pushing from the wider group, that's what this proposal is about.
How We Got Here
To a real proposal at what feels like the most hotly debated time in Hive history, that is. I want to be very honest about this part, because I think it matters.
I started on the legacy blockchain as a community member and a content creator. Many of you have heard my story when out speaking, or read along with it here on chain as time has gone on. When Hive was created, I was there with the witnesses and volunteers that made it happen, and I just. kept. going; not just as a consensus block producer… not as a paid employee of anything, but as someone who genuinely believed in what we were building and kept finding more ways to be useful because so many things weren’t being done. Now, this is an observation, not a complaint. You can check the 13.4 million dead cryptos (roughly 90% failure rate) and how many of them actually had funds and structure, and it should blow your mind that we have aligned enough to come together to create what Hive is today.
Over time, I’ve kept about 95% of my witness earnings here on chain instead of selling, as I don’t view those as salary and believe heavily in having the bulk of the say I’ve earned over the years able to be visible as skin in the game. As I’ve become a conduit for necessary spending for a no company no face no legal structure DAO with no foundation or protections (venues, social media or digital tool costs, transport or partnership needs) the ValuePlan initiative has covered reimbursement of my provably doxxed and spent expenses, but this has never been a salary and has often relied on me carrying large amounts in the thousands for a few months at a time. Everything else I’ve absorbed personally, on my own time, using up all of my vacations, leave, and opening me up to tax burdens and interest. Again, this is just facts, as we are now discussing what’s viable moving forward depending on where we want to go.
This wasn't a mistake, nor is underlining it a guilt trip. It was a choice I made freely and would make again (am still making.) Many of our builders face this same dilemma, but one of the biggest differences is that they are working hard to build viable businesses or sustainable services. Working on behalf of everyone and everything with no sustainability plan is a great joy and what I want to keep doing, but it’s also something that many have brought concerns to me about over time. My own experiences with working two full time careers and being responsible for caring for multiple branches of family have led to me starting to take them seriously. Years of doing this work without a salary, retainer, or defined position has a compounding cost. And quietly, the absence of any precedent for compensating this kind of work has also devalued all work, by everyone, across the ecosystem. That's the part I actually want to fix.
What This Proposal Covers
This is a retroactive lump sum proposal covering roughly six years of unpaid work since Hive's inception in 2020. I think it’s fair to state that Hive as it stands can’t be asked for a forward facing traditional salary of any sort, and that’s part of what has taken this long to create a proposal despite a lot of ongoing encouragement to do so. With the markets the way they are, our voluntaryist population, and a huge explosion of productivity tools, the correct approach in my mind is to heavily undervalue the work already done and allow it to create a small runway for me to continue fully engaged with Hive’s needs and the wants of the community going forward.
The ask is 90,000 HBD.
Some context for that number: over the same period, I personally carried approximately $60,000 USD in ecosystem expenses— event costs, legal fees, logistics, materials, partnership deals— fronted on my own credit and reimbursed only after submitting receipts and invoices, sometimes months later. Every transaction is on-chain with memos, and this number is easily checked via the DHF spending tracker. I was always made whole on expenses. What was never compensated is the labor, the time, and the years of operating as an unpaid external contact point for a chain with no formal entity to do any of it. I don’t think that expectation is fair when I chose to throw myself into these things without any promise of compensation, and I don’t think it can just be broken down to some perfect hourly number, so I am essentially looking at six full years of completed work and banking on my own productivity to become the personal resources and stepping stone to doing even more.
Additional context for anyone doing a deepdive: roughly $100,000 of the funds that moved through my account during this period were pass-through for ecosystem initiatives: the largest being a Binance learn and earn marketing campaign I negotiated to help us keep up a steady volume in place of paid market making, where I served as the financial bridge because no formal structure existed to handle it. Binance required the funds to come from me directly to them since there is no “team” wallet and they needed to tie the transaction to a person to a signed contract. That figure is separate from the ~$60,000 above, which is only personally fronted expenses, and you can verify it via two on chain memos.
I want to be shockingly clear that 90,000 HBD doesn't price labour at market rates. (It doesn't even try to come close.) Six years, working usually between three to eight hours a day, every day, evenings weekends and holidays, even at below minimum wage doesn’t match up. I want to point out that this is not based on trying to quantify what has been done by any traditional metric. That approach doesn’t make sense, but a first step toward establishing that this category of work has value without overclaiming on a position that was never formally defined is truly necessary. Several core contributors and a LOT of community members have made the case publicly that retroactive compensation for my quality work done in advance, where the community can evaluate the output before committing, is actually the lowest-risk model available to the DHF. I agree with that. Multiple people have even tried to make MUCH larger proposals for me, which I have asked to be removed. I have spent years thinking about how to approach this, and definitely recognize that almost no one will think it’s really “fair,” which is usually the sign of a balanced deal. This proposal reflects that.
The Cost of Moving On
Every exchange relationship, conference presence, and external partnership in this proposal required a consistent, accountable human on the other side of the table. More than community posts and a Discord announcement. A bulk of my time spent is being a person who could be reached, held to commitments, and trusted to show up again next quarter, yelled at when things go wrong, begged to find the right connections or solutions, challenged to create something new or better. The tasks and relationships that didn't get pursued because everyone has been so busy building all the things that make Hive fabulous; the ones no one had the bandwidth, the runway, or the standing to pursue don't show up effectively in this proposal. They're invisible, and part of that is on me because my default is to just put my head down and do the work instead of posting at length about what I could maybe do with the right support. But they’re the actual cost of leaving this category of work unfunded: less so an absence of output (because I am willing to say that I am pretty unstoppable) but rather the absence of opportunities that never materialized because the personal costs and infrastructure to capture them didn't exist. This proposal doesn't just compensate for work done: for now, I think it makes the argument that this “infrastructure” should exist and accelerate going forward, and that funding it retroactively is how I prove I mean it.
Representative Work
This could never be a complete list. It would take longer to read than this already ridiculous proposal. What follows instead is a representative sample across main categories.
Global presence, bizdev, and public speaking
Hive has had a consistent, credible presence at major industry events because I've shown up and made that happen. Always on personal time, subsidized by my career, leveraging my statuses and perks, out of a backpack presenting as a c-suite professional while operating on a shoestring. (My last event I traveled to the opposite side of the the world and cost less than a representative who lived in country.) I’ve also had other ecosystems begin to sponsor me, which is helpful… but a bit odd given the circumstances, so I’d like to move away from this in the future unless the Hive community sentiment is that I step away. Recent years have included keynote, special speaker slots or direct sales and lead gen for the ecosystem and dapps alike at Token2049, Web3 Global Events (Dubai, Amsterdam, Berlin), Rare Evo, Breathe Web3, Consensus, and a number of other events across multiple continents. In 2024, 100% of my personal paid vacation time went to in-person Hive work. On average I take on three to six public-facing outreach, education, devrel, or bizdev engagements a week: in-person events, live spaces, podcasts, panels. I have been working to grow this, and do usually have to turn some down based on time allocation. Everywhere I've spoken, I've been invited back. I am consistently growing our x spaces and our partner highlights, and I think this will probably become two to three a day if I let it grow unchecked. (Neat!)
A concrete example of what this looks like for a large IRL appearance at scale: I negotiated, designed, financed, and coordinated Hive's presence at multiple booth style events. In some cases up to 800+ square feet of floor space building everything from a main Hive pavilion and satellite stands, to negotiating add ons, side events, handling logistics and planning, and always placing the identity of the ecosystem and its builders first. It means skipping most of the parties, staying up all night working, living off ten coffees and the occasional french fry while making sure all of the people I bring are safe, fed, engaged and able to enjoy the experience while I shield them from correcting last minute mistakes or procurement issues. I usually also deliver multiple main stage talks, participate in panels and help moderate alongside doing event management. All the organizational, design, legal, logistics and contractor work is mine to own, absorbed personally at no cost to the ecosystem, with only direct event expenses covered through ValuePlan.
Exchange and CEX/DEX relationships
I've been the primary relationship holder for Hive's exchange pipeline since before this chain existed in its current form, including even doing some help for the legacy chain and co that shall not be named. I helped us secure our initial listings, continue pursuing additional listings, managing announcements, hardfork coordination with exchange tech teams, pitch prep, legal documentation, cross-promotions, and AMA facilitation. This actually did have an early proposal allocated to it very early on in Hive’s history if you remember; what I will say about that is that it was teamwork, and only one of us is still here. Our existing listings have been secured without paying listing fees, which in this industry is genuinely unusual. This ranges anywhere from coordinating short and long term campaigns, partner writeups and comarketing, negotiating and smoothing over our status as a chain who does not use market makers, and ongoing outreach toward major US and global listings. Biconomy is our newest addition, serving both US and Canadians alongside global users, and we’ve worked to have them deploy content to our chain, do deep dive features on us, and hopefully more integrations and features with them in the future.
Supporting long term listing resilience across CEXes and with a line of hopefully soon to be DEX relationships, I also have worked to start coordination of our AML list of bad actors and really pressuring our partnerships to use our social tools and work with us to help cut down on scams, have negotiated multiple software deals for developers and services, and am under a lot of contract and NDA requirements. There is a lot of gentle management of sentiment and behaviours in relationships with these groups, because we are actively working to replace and be free of them, while also still needing them in the interim and while not following most of their traditional practices directly impacting their bottom line. I’m particularly proud of how well we are perceived because of this, despite our reputation of being fiercely independent and ideological.
Cross-chain community imports
One of the highest-leverage things Hive can do apart from our dapps and our rapidly developing financial tools is to become the social homebase for ideologically aligned communities from other chains. I've put real time into building these relationships: Dash and DigiByte are great examples of where we are using our tech to help them to create forums and gathering places to add value to their own chains. This year, a lot of work from core and via HAF and other innovations means that we are much closer to just deploying Hive held content and data to other chain, TG communities, and business or project websites, replacing their CMS and forum solutions and finding community that shares our values. More in the pipeline as time goes on.
Wallet and service integration
In 2025 I sourced, vetted, and onboarded Zypto; a fintech company with a full suite of crypto financial tools including non-custodial wallet management, prepaid VISA cards, bill payments across ten countries, and a payment gateway into the ecosystem. This was the first time an outside financial services provider had submitted a Hive governance proposal, and the first non-Hive multiwallet solutions to back us and integrate us into their tech. This is all live and fully functional: HIVE and HBD are now usable across their complete product suite. (If you haven’t checked it out, it has crazy stuff including direct bill pay and cash withdrawals in the US, and a huge range of services globally, you really should!) They’ve become champions of Hive, and we’re working on some new payment rails, more services, and helping them also take advantage of Hive’s social tools. I have ongoing relationships with many multichain wallet providers, but up until this point as a non-EVM/SVM, it’s been very hard to convince them to put development overhead in. With the advances in agentic coding, it’s time to get back out there and create more access points under this umbrella as a bulk of the blockers are lifted. This is a direct result of the kind of work this proposal is asking the ecosystem to retroactively support.
Operational and ecosystem support
Beyond the headline work: there are years of graphic design, motion graphics, and visual assets provided free to any project that needed them; direct support to dapps and projects navigating hardforks, upgrades, and listings; coordination across community gathering spaces; and that sustained personal financial bridge fronting costs, managing receipts, keeping things moving until the reimbursement cycle caught up. I want to be able to ramp this up because it’s the type of work that really supports our builders in their skill or resource gaps and helps them keep everything else possible.
What Comes Next
This proposal is a first step to using my own incredibly dense and valuable work as a runway to provide more capacity. I have always been hampered by the fact that I have been working more than full time elsewhere just to be able work for Hive. I would like to try to really put Hive first and do more because people are asking me to, but I have to recognize that that means that I’m putting myself and my family at some risk and I don’t think that makes sense as the “expected” baseline for our ecosystem. What follows are the four categories of work I've already begun and am committing more to as the foundation for the future, because there still is no perfect structure for a job or position and there may not be for a long time. That some day will require clearer deliverables, harder edges, and community-built accountability structures, which I think come from assessing work already done and refining processes. These pillars are my takeaway of what I’ve done already that creates outcome, and that are much more actionable if I pour even more into.
The organizing principle across all four is the same: Hive is infrastructure and Hive is community. These two ideas meet in technology that is fast, feeless, open access, instant finality, with no gatekeepers. Every pillar below is about making that more visible, more usable, and harder to ignore. As I work through these over the coming year I'll be writing a lot more about it as it happens, because if this stuff works, it should work for everyone building here. These pillars reflect categories that I’ve discussed at length with a ton of people from the ecosystem and fold a lot of their feedback (asks, desires, complaints, you name it) into what I’ve created and what I think is the most important to grow. I suspect many of you will see our chats reflected in here, so I appreciate your candidness in working with me on this.
Catalyst: building and growing external relationships
There's a wide world of projects, communities, chains, exchanges, event organizers, and businesses that don't know what Hive offers or haven't found their way here yet. One of the things I’ve proven I excel at is going out and changing perception: creating connections, brokering introductions, and identifying the partnerships and integrations that move the needle for the ecosystem. Chasing down opportunities that range from ecosystem down to b2b for a dapp or direct sales for one of our own events, because the ones I’ve made so far have tended to compound.
- Continue and expand the CEX/DEX integration pipeline with active outreach toward new listings and cross-promotions, prioritizing major US-accessible exchanges and emerging DEX platforms including coordination with Magi and our ecosystem contracts and solutions
- Identify and pursue the next round of cross-chain community imports, building on the Dash/DigiByte model to bring ideologically aligned communities onto Hive as active participants, not just token holders
- Source and vet new B2B integration opportunities in the Zypto mold: fintech, payment processors, and service providers where Hive and HBD's speed and zero-fee structure are a genuine product advantage
- Support lead generation and business development across Hive's dapp ecosystem, helping projects find and close the partnerships and users that grow both their individual products and the chain's overall footprint
- Take on a greater role in sponsorship generation for events like ChainCulture
Strategist — planning, vetting, and thought leadership
For a long time I’ve been slowly developing a considered plan for where Hive's energy and presence actually belong: which events, which partnerships, which opportunities are worth pursuing and which are theater. It also includes the thought leadership that goes along with it… being vocal and visible in the right spaces about what genuinely decentralized, feeless, social blockchain infrastructure actually makes possible, in language that lands with people who don't already speak crypto. I meet people where they are and then figure out the messaging that works best; sometimes that’s the tea cozy metaphor for an end user normie, sometimes it’s explaining a section of the codebase itself to an outside dev. The most important part is then making these forms of comms widely accessible to everyone, and also helping bring our diverse value props under a more consistent northstar with the language and encouragement for more people to feel confident in joining in
- Continue modernizing a unified Hive brand and communications strategy based on what’s working, and establishing consistent voice, visual direction, and messaging framework that dapps and community members can align with as I take on more work improving Hive.io
- Maintain visible thought leadership positioning in external spaces (podcasts, panels, written pieces, live sessions) focused on Hive as human and technical infrastructure rather than just a crypto project, so our dapps and builder tools become even more of a focus funnel
- Take on a bulk of Hive’s X and other social media work, since I’ve built a custom set of tools for consistently pushing our message and greater activity across a number of outside platforms. Each time I take over, we see a huge spike in activity and outside notice, and in any other ecosystem, it would be a full time job on its own. GTM means we actually have to… well, GTM. I’ve spent the last month or so building scaffolding as well as doing a bunch of work to build out analysis on our previous metrics, competition, building an “idea well” and creating ‘listeners’ who will feed our inter ecosystem comms into a pipeline with outer cryptospace trends so that we have human first, non-slop engagement at the fore. Parts of the scaffolding that are continually refined will be brought back and made available to dapps and projects alike if they want
Steward — maintaining what exists and keeping it healthy
Relationships need tending, and this is a huge part of my work day to day now. Exchanges, partners, dapps, and community touchpoints that already exist require consistent, professional follow-through to stay alive and productive. This is the less glamorous, more important half of bizdev, but also shapes a lot of the comms that fall under other pillars.
- Ongoing relationship management across all active exchange and partner integrations: hardfork coordination, tech team communication, re-listing defense, proactive check-ins to keep existing listings healthy and current, problem solving and reassurance, and continued work to create more co-marketing opportunities out of their reach or more adoption of our own tech by them
- Serve as a consistent liaison between ecosystem dapps and projects and the broader chain, supporting teams through upgrades, governance questions, and operational challenges as they arise to help the ecosystem as a whole feel more coordinated and informed
- Work on and improve Hive's gathering spaces, bridging gaps between developer, governance, and user-facing conversations that otherwise happen in silos, as well as improving and deploying new/improved bots, integrations and upgrades for our telegram and discord
Builder — operational infrastructure and knowledge transfer
The goal isn't to be the only person who can do any of this. This pillar is about making the thinking behind the work visible and accessible so the ecosystem's collective ability to represent itself gets stronger over time, while building the operational backbone that makes the rest of it scale.
- Create and publish reference materials drawn from talks, presentations, and outreach work so the ecosystem can see how Hive is being positioned externally and distill those ideas into their own advocacy
- Take on some serious work for the hive.io content pipeline, including creating roundups and updates, gitlab reviews, and dapp versioning for the @hiveblocks on chain account to be pulled onto our main website, all of our comms channels, drive developer-facing documentation improvements with a focus on bringing agent MCPs and skills created by our builders to the front, and spending time making sure that our main tech developments are actually being used on and showcased by our own homepage. SEO and AEO, with Hive as the functioning database and tools behind updating info and sections on our static site, and a big focus on surfacing data that specifically meets the gaps that agents are perceiving when creating profiles on us in aggregate that are then used by outside content mills
This list is a just a starting point. If you have priorities you want to see added, adjusted, or weighted differently, the comments are open for it. I’ve become very used to the fact that this topic will basically light everyone on fire and create a lot of adversarial opinions. As long as we’re all baseline nice to each other, feel free to say what you like.
The Ask
90,000 HBD, disbursed as a lump sum to @crimsonclad via the @cczswap wallet.
It's a conservative number, below what even just a rough accounting of personal financial exposure over six years would suggest is fair. It doesn't try to value the labor at market rates. It's intentionally modest because the goal is a defensible personal precedent that allows me to keep working as I have been, without maximizing a one-time payout or a “guaranteed” annual cheque from a system I care about. I plan to stretch the payment period out over four or so months so that it does not impact the DHF daily very heavily, though I do know that this again is also a risk to myself when we are considering retroactive pay.
There is always risk, but we have a lot more work to do, and I’m starting (well, continuing) regardless. 🖤
Ecency: https://ecency.com/proposals/368 PeakD: https://peakd.com/proposals/368
Voted for @crimsonclad my favorite hiver
I have never voted on a proposal ,since i have no use for peakd or ecency of anything on the list there seems like a waste and a drain you already have hive.blog . maybe if only there was a benefit they could feed themselves, but your different the one credible voice of common sense keep it together must be a lotta work for anyone and i have feeling your very good at it. It may seem like a lot but it really isn't by any corporate measure but who am i to say you should really ask for more :))) just thank you ...
