Precious Budget, Lease and Vote Value Update

It’s no secret that the HIVE price is currently in the toilet and sentiment around the platform is not in a particularly good place as a result. There are a number of projects on HIVE that have run into trouble recently but here at SGS we have, for the most part, been carrying on with business-as-usual regardless – just as we have throughout previous downturns and crypto winters. However, the Precious project is not exactly immune to these environmental factors and it’s probably about time I posted a project update since we hit a bit of a snag last week which has caused some concern.

The Vote Values coming from the @ssg-community account have been dropping for some time now alongside the HIVE price itself because the two are firmly linked. However on top of that we’ve been facing some gradual budget cuts to our Hive Power Leases every 3 months when each new Powerdown is initiated. This most recent Powerdown that kicked off a couple of weeks back reduced our weekly budget to just 435 Hive per week and I had to terminate 2 of our smaller (non-member) leases to balance the books. This would have also dropped our Vote Value by a small amount but I doubt anyone noticed...

However, last week our largest lease was terminated unexpectedly and we dropped 100,000 Hive Power from @ssg-community in an instant which dropped our Vote Value by about 40%...and that WAS noticed by many members of our community. I won’t go into the reasons why that happened. I’m not particularly happy about how that all went down and some of the things that were said about me, but it DID happen and in this post I’m going to try and focus on what that means going forward and what comes next...

I’d like to firstly take the opportunity to remind people that I am a volunteer in this role as custodian of the community curation project here on Hive. I don’t get paid. I get a vote on my own content when I post and if you look at my blog I’ve made about 2 posts in the last month with Author Rewards combining to a total of $1.42. I have provided support to users consistently 7 days a week and am usually pretty responsive on discord if I am not asleep. Apart from a short hiatus in 2019 I’ve done this for about 8 years. However, I was always assured that I at least would NOT be left out-of-pocket and expenses incurred in the provision of services would be covered without issue. Which brings me to my next point.

For those who are unaware, the code-based services that effectively constitute the Precious project run on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) that currently costs $6.60 USD per month. This expense has always been paid in the past but with budget cuts to the core project affecting leases it has not been paid up since June 2025. As a result this expense has been paid out of my own pocket and the project is currently 5 months overdue. If you want to look at the transaction history these are the VPS expense payments the project has paid going back to 2021.

So, why am I bringing this up now? Well the loss of our largest delegator may have dropped our Voting Power but it has also created a short term budget surplus and so I am going to use that surplus to pay the outstanding VPS expenses. Once this is done I’ll be canvassing reliable EXISTING lessors of Hive Power that are Trusted Members of SGS to see if they want to increase their lease amounts. Stay tuned on that front because I will likely reach out via Discord.

In the longer run, as a community and as a project we do have a problem with the ongoing downward trajectory of the Hive price and platform itself. Budget funds are dwindling and I have been reluctant to fund raise via Monster Raffle or otherwise due to the issues with Hive. That’s probably worth another post or 2 but the Hive to Silver Ratio over the last 12 months has been in utter free fall so I think we’ve made the right choice by not investing more into the platform. However the fact remains that our project is slowly going broke here. If the Hive price continues to decline below 10 cents then there is a point where even the modest VPS expense can no longer be justified. I am also personally reaching the point where I am no longer willing or able to provide the level of support that seems to be expected of me. More on that later but I want to be transparent about where we are headed if things don’t improve.