I've been on this chain since the Steemit days. I've watched it fork, rebrand, survive, and keep going when most people outside the ecosystem assumed it was dead.
Hive is still here because a relatively small group of developers and community members kept building when there was no hype cycle pushing them forward. That matters, and it's worth protecting.
But I think we need to have an honest conversation about how we fund development going forward, because I don't think we're always getting it right.
The Decentralised Hive Fund is one of the most interesting things about this blockchain. A community-controlled treasury that funds development? That's genuinely ahead of its time. Most chains would kill for that kind of mechanism. But having the mechanism isn't enough if we're not using it well.
Too often, proposals are vague. They describe general areas of work rather than specific deliverables. They fund people rather than projects. And the accountability structures, when they exist at all, rely on trust rather than verification. That's not a criticism of anyone's intentions. Most people proposing work on Hive are doing it in good faith. But good faith doesn't scale, and community money deserves more structure than "I'll show you what I did at the end of the month."
If you ask most active Hive users what the chain needs, you'll get a pretty consistent list. Better onboarding. More polished frontends. Mobile apps that don't feel like they were built in 2018. Developer documentation that doesn't require archaeology to navigate. Infrastructure that can handle growth if it ever comes. API stability. Tooling for new developers who want to build here but don't know where to start.
We know what needs building. The community has been saying it for years. So why aren't we funding those things directly?
There's another issue that doesn't get talked about enough, and it's uncomfortable because it implicates the social dynamics of the community itself.
Getting a proposal funded on the DHF isn't just about having a good idea or being a capable developer. It's about being known. Having the right connections. Being visible enough that the stakeholders who control the votes actually see your proposal and take it seriously.
And if you're a skilled developer who's been quietly building on Hive without cultivating a social media presence or networking with the right witnesses and whales, your chances of getting funded drop dramatically. Not because your work isn't good, but because nobody with enough stake knows who you are.
I see the same names cycling through funded proposals. And to be clear, a lot of those people are doing genuinely good work. Open source tooling, infrastructure, core contributions. I'm not questioning the quality of what's being funded. I'm questioning what we're missing because of who never even bothers to submit.
How many developers on Hive have the skills to build something meaningful but have never put forward a proposal because they looked at the process and thought "why bother?" They don't have a network of large stakeholders backing them. They don't have years of social capital built up through blogging and community politics.
They just know how to write code.
And the system, as it works today, doesn't really have a path for those people.
That's a real loss for the ecosystem. Not a theoretical one. Every developer who looks at the DHF and decides it's not worth the effort is someone who could have been building something Hive actually needs. And we'll never know what we missed because the barrier wasn't technical ability. It was visibility.
This is part of why I think bounties and clearly scoped project funding matter so much. A bounty doesn't care who you are. It doesn't care how many followers you have or whether a top 20 witness knows your name. It says "here's a problem, here's what it pays, deliver the solution." That levels the playing field in a way that the current proposal system simply doesn't.
A developer in Nigeria or Vietnam or wherever, someone with real skills but zero social capital on Hive, can look at a bounty board and participate on equal footing with someone who's been in the inner circle for years.
If we're serious about growing the developer ecosystem, we have to solve the surfaceability problem. Because right now, the talent pipeline on Hive has a filter at the front that has nothing to do with talent. It's a politics game and from the outside it actually looks like gatekeeping.
A community-maintained list of needs. Not a wish list, but a living document maintained by developers and active users that outlines specific gaps in the ecosystem. What tools are missing? What existing tools need serious work? What would make Hive more attractive to new developers and new users? This list becomes the foundation for everything else.
Proposals tied to specific deliverables. Instead of "fund me to work on Hive stuff," proposals should look more like "I will build X, here are the milestones, here is what the community gets at the end." Scope it. Define what done looks like. Make it possible for the community to evaluate whether they got what they paid for.
Bounties for high-priority work. Some things on that needs list are going to be smaller in scope. Fix this bug. Build this library. Write documentation for this API. These don't need full proposals. They need bounties. Put a price on the work, let developers claim it, pay on completion. Simple, fast, and accountable.
Milestone-based funding for larger projects. For bigger efforts like new dApps, major infrastructure work, or frontend overhauls, fund in stages. First milestone gets funded, developer delivers, community reviews, next milestone gets funded. Nobody gets a lump sum and disappears. Nobody has to trust that the work will get done. The structure handles it.
I'll say this because it's relevant to conversations happening right now: AI coding tools are powerful. I use them. They make me faster. A skilled developer with access to Claude Code or Copilot or Cursor can genuinely produce work at a pace that would have been unrealistic a couple of years ago.
But funding tool subscriptions is not the same as funding development. If a developer produces great work for Hive, fund the work. The developer can decide what tools they need and factor that into their costs. We don't fund developers' IDE licenses or cloud hosting bills as separate line items. AI subscriptions shouldn't be any different.
The value is in the output, not the tooling. Always has been.
This isn't about being harsh or gatekeeping who gets to build on Hive. It's the opposite. If we fund clearly scoped work with real accountability, we actually make it easier for new developers to contribute. Someone who's never built on Hive before can look at a bounty board, find something in their skill range, deliver it, and get paid. That's a better on-ramp than "write a post explaining why you deserve funding and hope someone approves you."
And for established developers, milestone-based funding is more respectful of their time, not less. It means they don't have to write long justification posts or play politics. They propose work, they do the work, they get paid for the work. Clean.
Hive has survived this long because the people here care about it. But caring isn't a strategy. We need to be more deliberate about how we allocate resources, more specific about what we're funding, and more rigorous about what we expect in return. The treasury isn't infinite, and every dollar spent on something vague is a dollar not spent on something that could actually move the needle.
I'm genuinely curious. If you could point the DHF at three specific things that would make the biggest difference for Hive's future, what would they be? Not categories, not "more development." Specific things. A mobile app. A particular API improvement. A developer onboarding guide. A frontend feature.
Let's start building that list. Because the money is there. The developers are here. We just need to connect the two in a way that actually produces results.
