Hive Proposal Costs per Active User

In a rather lengthy discussion today someone asked how many active users do we have currently. I took a guess of around 5,000 - 15,000, but said it was really difficult to accurately calculate.

I did however run my report that I use as a rough estimate.

Based on this, I got an average of 8,067.25 after ignoring July 2023 outlier. While I think this is a fairly accurate assessment, it isn't perfect for two reasons. Most users on Hive have 2-10 accounts. Also, a lot of dapp users like Splinterlands likely don't make posts. Let's pretend these two facts balance each other out and this number is an accurate reflection of our active monthly users.

With that in mind, I took all the proposals paid out in the last 365 days and compared them to the average monthly users. This gives me a rough number of how much each proposal costs per user per year on an ongoing basis. Now this number is also not perfect, as some proposals just started getting funded, and others maybe coming up to ending funding. It is however an accurate comparison of how much funding has been distributed in the last year, and most proposals are renewed yearly for potentially even more money. This is also affected by proposals that were only partially funded.

This is a purely analytical observation of the data taking the total funds distributed by the DHF and dividing by the average monthly active users. This gives us a rough yearly cost per active user to maintain each proposal funded in the last year.

Keep in mind, we are only estimating the average active monthly users based on unique user accounts creating a top level post each month. It also only calculates DHF funds distributed, not how much was asked for. Some proposals just started or were only funded briefly, and will affect where they fall in this chart.