Many blockchains have some sort of “Development Fund” and most that do have had some of the initial token sale put aside to make sure that the blockchain being launched will be able to fund ongoing development post-launch. However, many of those “Development Funds” tend to end up being centrally controlled by some (hopefully benevolent) entity or entities. Anyone here who can recognise the names Ned Scott or Justin Sun would quickly realise that those centralised Development Funds aren’t always benevolent and they can’t really be relied on to deliver value to the blockchains stakeholders.
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That’s where HIVE is one of the blockchains that is again showing some real innovation and progress in the crypto space. When Steemit was sold, the whole ugly-fork thing happened and HIVE was born there were enough senior witnesses around with the foresight to try and set up proper decentralised governance for this blockchain. They set up a Decentralised HIVE Fund (DHF) that stakeholders could vote on. At first I was a bit sceptical because big stakeholders have done some pretty ordinary things in the past and I half expected them to just vote to feed their own stake. But as it’s had a chance to mature it does look like the DHF is actually working in a fairly decentralised way….
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If you go to the Proposals Page you can see what proposals are getting funding and you can even vote for the ones you like yourself. I’m not saying the proposals are free from controversy – far from it, because every properly functioning democracy always has some level of controversy and robust debate. However, it is interesting to have a close look and see how the DHF is working. A quick look through the proposals being voted on gives a good insight into what the developers are working on and what issues are currently considered most important for this blockchain. The reason why I am writing about this today is because there are 2 current proposals that I think are both important and on some level they seem to be competing for funding….so I am faced with a bit of a dilemma. Let me give you a quick rundown of them and maybe you can help decide which is more worthy.
Any of my long term readers would know that I’ve been banging on about the HIVE (and STEEM) Stablecoin for years now. I am a firm believer that this blockchain needs a functioning Stablecoin to attract some real world commerce and the potential for HIVE to have a reliable Stablecoin that is NOT backed by fiat or crypto collateral is a pretty exciting prospect. This year we once again have the Hive Backed Dollar (HBD) breaking it’s peg to the upside during the crypto bull market and while many Reward Farmers would (once again) cheer this development, it renders the HBD useless for its intended purpose. The HBD Stabiliser proposal uses funding from the Decentralised Hive Fund (DHF) to sell HBD into the market (to lower the price) and then donate the HIVE proceeds back into the DHF. In the absence of Reverse Conversion functionality (which is finally now being seriously considered) this is the next best thing – but it comes at a cost….other development proposals can’t access as many funds while the HBD Stabiliser is drawing so much from the DHF budget.
One of the really great tools for developers and analysts on HIVE (like myself) is HiveSQL. This is a database containing all the blockchain data for HIVE and it’s kept updated in near real-time. Whenever I am doing an analytical writing piece I normally start out by poking around in HiveSQL to generate tables and graphs that I use to try and make sense out of things and construct my case. Initially the HiveSQL (previously called SteemSQL) was free, but it does cost money to pay for the servers and infrastructure it runs on so it started running on a paid-subscription model for some years. I would sometimes shell out to access it for a day so I could write an analytical post, but it wasn’t really worth it for my infrequent level of access. Late last year a proposal was put up to fund the HiveSQL infrastructure from the DHF to make access free for people like me. This was great to see and it was initially successful, but now it’s about to lose its funding again and go back to paid subscriptions because support for its funding proposal has dropped below the threshold required.
I personally think that both proposals are worth supporting and maybe if we get Reverse Conversions implemented we won’t need the HBD Stabiliser any more and that can free up some of the DHF funding for other worthwhile projects like HiveSQL. However, regardless of what you think about these proposals the point of this post is to show that here on HIVE we do actually have functioning Decentralised Governance of our blockchain. Sure the DHF is not perfect but it’s a hell of a lot better than what we had before and it’s a better system than what most blockchains have. HIVE really is a market leader in some areas and Decentralised Governance of its own development is one of them.