Hive is decentralized at the blockchain level but people do not experience Hive through blocks and transaction hashes alone.
They experience it through apps, mobile clients, wallets, image hosting, search, APIs, notifications, onboarding flows, support channels, and reliable infrastructure that works every day.
That layer has a real cost.
Over the past weeks we shared several posts about Ecency's proposal, our operational transparency, what Ecency does beyond the app, and how our work benefits Hive. We also followed the recent community discussion around HIVE price, DHF spending, sustainability, and whether frontends should be expected to generate more of their own revenue.
The discussion is uncomfortable, but fair.
DHF is not free money. Every proposal creates a cost for the ecosystem, especially in a weak market. Every funded team, including us, should be able to explain what value it creates, what it costs, what can be reduced, and what the tradeoffs are.
So we are making a change.
We are reducing our intended daily ask from 333 HBD/day to 250 HBD/day.
This means we will also scale down parts of our infrastructure commitment and operational footprint. We will keep prioritizing the systems that matter most for Hive's resilience and user access, but we will have to make harder choices about capacity, redundancy, support load, and development speed.
It is the reality of operating in the current market. If the community wants smaller DHF obligations, projects have to become smaller, slower, more selective, or more dependent on outside revenue.
Ecency is no exception.
Ecency is not only a frontend.
We maintain web and mobile apps, onboarding flows, user support, open-source SDK/rendering/wallet tooling, image hosting, Hive RPC access, search/indexing, signing-related services, and other infrastructure that users and sometimes other apps depend on.
With a reduced ask, our priority will be to preserve the most important layers:
Keeping Ecency web and mobile usable and maintained
Maintaining critical publishing, wallet, and account flows
Keeping essential image availability and media delivery working
Maintaining reliable Hive access through our own infrastructure where it matters most
Continuing security, abuse prevention, and anti-fraud work
Keeping core open-source packages and frontend code available for the ecosystem
Supporting users at a reduced but still responsible level
Some lower-priority infrastructure, extra capacity, experiments, and convenience layers may have to be reduced, delayed, simplified, or moved to more cost-conscious setups.
That is the direct consequence of scaling down.
Ecency could reduce costs by relying more heavily on outside services.
We could depend more on other image hosts. We could depend more on other public nodes. We could push more responsibility to third-party infrastructure and remove more of that cost from our own balance sheet.
That would be cheaper for Ecency in the short term.
But it would not necessarily make Hive stronger.
When Hive apps depend too much on a few external services, the ecosystem becomes more fragile. If an image host disappears, old content breaks. If a public node is overloaded or unavailable, users cannot interact smoothly. If search, APIs, authentication, or media delivery are controlled by too few operators, the platform gains hidden single points of failure.
That is not the resilience Hive should aim for.
This is why Ecency has continued to run and maintain key infrastructure ourselves. It is not the cheapest path, but it has been the more resilient path.
With the reduced ask, we will keep that principle where it matters most, but we will also be more aggressive about reducing cost and accepting some tradeoffs.
We keep most of our work open source because that is aligned with Hive.
Open source means the community can inspect the code, fork it, improve it, run its own instance, or build on top of it. That is healthy. It prevents lock-in. It gives the community options.
But open source does not mean free to operate.
The code can be public, but the servers still have monthly bills. The systems still need monitoring. Abuse still needs to be handled. Images still need storage and bandwidth. Nodes still need maintenance. Users still need support. Releases still need testing, security work, and ongoing development.
There are also hidden costs that rarely show up in simple infrastructure comparisons.
Running a front-facing application with user-generated content means dealing with abuse, fraud, moderation pressure, DMCA and legal requests, account recovery, user mistakes, and sometimes legal exposure. We have already faced UGC-related legal costs, including a Lithuanian court case that cost roughly 15,000 EUR unexpectedly. That money would otherwise have supported development and infrastructure.
These are not theoretical costs. They are part of operating a real public application.
Some people reasonably ask why apps and frontends do not simply generate enough revenue to cover everything themselves.
We agree that revenue matters.
We are actively exploring and building paths such as hive-x402, AI credits, Ecency Points, self-hosted Vision-Next/community deployments, and other service-level models. We are not against business models, paid features, ads, services, or external income.
But we also want to be honest: none of those currently covers the real cost of operating everything at production scale.
There is also a reality specific to open-source public goods: much of the value Ecency creates is intentionally shared with the whole Hive ecosystem.
When we improve onboarding, Hive benefits.
When we keep images available, Hive content benefits.
When we improve SEO and server rendering, Hive authors benefit.
When we maintain open-source SDKs, rendering tools, wallets, and frontend code, other builders benefit.
When we operate infrastructure instead of depending entirely on outside parties, Hive becomes more resilient.
Those benefits are real, even when they are not fully captured as Ecency revenue.
That said, the team cannot depend on hope forever. If Hive and Ecency cannot sustain full-time work at the current level, then we have to look for other revenue sources, other jobs, or a much smaller operating model. That is not dramatic. It is just reality.
That is also an option.
Ecency can continue existing as an open-source project with slower development, reduced infrastructure, lower support expectations, and a smaller team commitment. The community can run instances. Contributors can fork the code. Content rewards, donations, paid services, and future revenue experiments can support some of the work.
But that version of Ecency would not be the same as the current one.
It would mean fewer guarantees, slower response times, less redundancy, reduced infrastructure responsibility, and fewer people able to spend full-time energy on Hive.
That may be what the community wants. If so, we should be honest about it.
Hive cannot ask projects to operate like full-time infrastructure providers while funding them like hobby projects. Both paths are valid, but they lead to different outcomes.
DHF support is not charity. It is not a reward for past effort. It is a community decision about what infrastructure, software, and public goods are worth sustaining.
If the community wants reliable open-source frontends, independent infrastructure, strong onboarding, long-term content availability, and teams that keep building and maintaining through difficult markets, then some of that has to be treated as shared infrastructure.
If the community does not see enough value in that, then projects like ours must reduce infrastructure, externalize more services, slow development, and shift more responsibility to community-run instances or outside revenue.
That is the tradeoff.
We have reduced costs, reduced team size, published transparency reports, answered proposal questions, kept development open, and continued shipping across web, mobile, wallet, onboarding, infrastructure, and ecosystem tooling.
Now we are reducing the ask further to 250 HBD/day and adjusting our commitments accordingly.
We will continue to work for Hive because we believe Hive still matters. But we also have to be realistic about what can be sustained.
If you believe Hive needs reliable open-source frontends, independent infrastructure, strong onboarding, long-term content availability, and fewer ecosystem-level single points of failure, please consider supporting Ecency's revised proposal direction.
Proposal #379:
https://ecency.com/proposals/379
Transparency:
Open source gives the community freedom.
Community support keeps that freedom usable.
