Pollen: A Safer, Cleaner Path Forward for Hive JavaScript Developer...

Hey everyone,

I have been spending a lot of time lately looking at modernizing the available developer tools around Hive.

Its not really flashy work, at least not the kind of thing that gets a giant launch trailer.

But this kind of work does matter if we want people to keep building on Hive without fighting against decade-old tooling, stale dependency trees, and fragile build systems.

One of the biggest pieces of that work is Pollen, the modern TypeScript SDK for Hive.

Pollen started from a simple idea:

What if developers could move forward from dhive without having to relearn how to build Hive apps?

That is the balance I have been trying to strike.

Pollen should feel familiar to anyone who has used dhive, but underneath it should be much safer, much cleaner, and much more in line with the JavaScript ecosystem we actually have today.

First, Respect Where `dhive` Came From

Before I say anything else, I want to be clear about this:

dhive matters.

It helped define JavaScript development on Hive. A lot of apps, bots, scripts, and experiments were built with it. It gave developers a usable client, transaction signing, broadcast helpers, database helpers, Hivemind helpers, and a familiar way to talk to the chain from Node.js and the browser.

That work deserves respect.

But software ages.

The JavaScript ecosystem from the Browserify/Babel/Mocha era is not the same ecosystem we are using now. Some dependencies went unmaintained. Some cryptography packages became uncomfortable to keep around. Some build assumptions made sense years ago and are just baggage now.

So this is not about dunking on dhive.

It is about carrying the useful shape of it forward.

The Security Difference Is Not Small

I ran both projects through CVE Lite, using the lockfiles as the source of truth.

For dhive, the report showed:

906 packages scanned
82 findings
117 CVEs
16 critical
35 high
25 medium
6 low
3 direct vulnerable dependencies
79 transitive vulnerable dependencies

Screenshot 2026-06-08 at 10-17-49 CVE Lite — dhive-cropped.png

The direct fixes suggested by the report were for:

node-fetch
secp256k1
karma

But that only covered 3 of the 82 findings. The rest were transitive dependencies buried in the old toolchain and dependency tree.

That is the real problem with old JavaScript projects. The visible dependencies are only part of the story. The bigger risk is usually the stack of packages underneath them.

For Pollen, the same scanner showed:

468 packages scanned
0 findings
0 CVEs
0 critical
0 high
0 medium
0 low

Screenshot 2026-06-08 at 10-17-18 CVE Lite — hive-pollen.png

That does not mean "perfect security forever."

No scanner can promise that.

The report itself is careful about this: CVE Lite checks package versions against OSV advisories. It does not prove runtime exploitability or guarantee that every advisory is reachable in your app.

But as a maintenance signal, the difference is huge.

One project is carrying a large amount of legacy dependency risk. The other has been rebuilt around a much smaller, modern dependency surface.

That is exactly what Pollen is aiming to achieve.

What Changed Under the Hood

Pollen is not just a rename.

The internals have been modernized pretty aggressively:

pnpm replaced the old yarn/npm workflow
Vitest replaced the older Mocha/nyc test setup
esbuild replaced the legacy Browserify-style browser build
oxlint and oxfmt replaced slower legacy linting and formatting paths
Pure ESM replaced older module assumptions
native BigInt replaced JSBI
native Uint8Array replaced the old byte-buffer style internals
native fetch replaced fetch polyfill dependencies
@noble cryptography replaced legacy crypto packages
strict TypeScript work cleaned up the core library and protocol types

The big one for me is the cryptography and serialization layer.

Hive transaction signing is not a place where I want a pile of old dependencies doing mystery work. Pollen uses the modern @noble cryptographic stack and a native byte engine built around Uint8Array and DataView.

That means fewer moving parts, clearer code, better browser behavior, and less dependency risk.

But the Developer Experience Is Familiar

The important part is that Pollen still feels like the SDK Hive JavaScript developers already know.

If you used dhive, this probably looks familiar:

import { Client } from "@hiveio/dhive";

const client = new Client(["https://api.hive.blog"]);
const accounts = await client.database.getAccounts(["thecrazygm"]);

With Pollen, the same idea becomes:

import { Client } from "@srbde/pollen";

const client = new Client(["https://api.hive.blog"]);
const accounts = await client.database.getAccounts(["thecrazygm"]);

That is the migration story I wanted.

Not "throw everything away and learn a totally different SDK."

More like:

Keep the mental model. Replace the foundation.

Broadcasting is the same kind of story:

import { Client, PrivateKey } from "@srbde/pollen";

const client = new Client(["https://api.hive.blog"]);
const key = PrivateKey.from(process.env.ACTIVE_KEY!);

await client.broadcast.transfer(
  {
    from: "youraccount",
    to: "recipient",
    amount: "0.001 HIVE",
    memo: "Sent with Pollen",
  },
  key,
);

The names are familiar:

Client
PrivateKey
client.database
client.broadcast
getAccounts
getDiscussions
transfer
vote
comment

This is intentional.

Pollen is different where it matters most: dependency health, typing, crypto, build tooling, bundling, and maintainability.

It is familiar where developers need it to be familiar: the way you actually write Hive apps.

The Honest Migration Notes

Most app code should be able to start by changing the import:

- import { Client, PrivateKey } from "@hiveio/dhive";
+ import { Client, PrivateKey } from "@srbde/pollen";

But there are a few honest notes:

Pollen targets modern JavaScript and TypeScript.
It expects Node.js 18+.
It is Pure ESM.
Older CommonJS-only projects may need a small module-system update.
Very old browser build setups may need to move to a modern bundler.

I consider those tradeoffs worth it.

Supporting old build systems forever is one of the reasons JavaScript dependency trees become so risky in the first place. At some point, a project has to move forward.

Pollen tries to make that move as painless as possible without dragging the old risk along with it.