We need a mechanism to suspend or slash DHF funding when the market is in the gutter, the same way Hive already has mechanisms that respond to debt levels. Why doesn't this exist yet? Because right now the DHF is getting absolutely rorted and nobody seems to care.
No offence to the Peak open team, but can we stop pretending front-ends are expensive to run? They look nice, sure. But these projects are built on top of an existing chain. They're not running consensus nodes. They're not keeping the lights on for Hive. You can serve a front-end like Peakd or Ecency off an edge cache for pocket change. The actual cost of running these things is basically nothing. So I'll ask again: where is all the money going?
Ecency is siphoning 396 HBD per day. That's roughly USD $133,000 a year. For what? Seriously, for what? Who even uses Ecency? I never see anyone talk about it. I don't use it. I don't know a single person who fires up Ecency and goes yeah this is totally worth $133k a year. I'm sure some people use it, but not enough to justify that.
And before anyone says "well Peakd is different," yeah, Peakd is actually good. I use it. The community uses it. It's the best front-end on Hive and it's not even close. But the Peak open team is pulling 635 HBD per day. That's around USD $231,000 a year. To do what? Shuffle some CSS around? Ship side projects nobody asked for? That's one or two senior developer salaries depending on where you're hiring. And we're spending that on a front-end that's already built and whatever else they're building? You could put that money into node infrastructure or marketing. You could fund onboarding that actually brings new blood to the chain. Instead it's going to a team making incremental updates to something that already works.
Ecency needs to be defunded yesterday. It provides nothing worth even a fraction of what it's taking. 396 HBD a year would be generous. And Peakd, as good as it is, needs to open the books. Show us the cost breakdowns. Show us where every dollar goes. "We're building things" is not an answer. That's what every overfunded startup says right before they fold. Honestly, these projects have taken enough. Maybe when Hive was 60 cents people were more forgiving, but now is not the time to be spending like the money is endless, because Hive is in legitimate danger right now and we should be protecting it.
I can tell you right now that if anyone were to rebuild what Ecency or Peakd offers right now today (especially with LLM assist), it wouldn't cost ANYWHERE near as much as the amount these projects are making yearly to build, host and maintain. They might as well rename is the Hive Fraud Fund (HFF) because people are just bleeding it dry. And it's in times like these you really see who is here for the money and who cares about the survival of Hive.
People should be furious about this. And these are just two examples. There are plenty more proposals draining the DHF the same way (don't get me started about that stupid Claude Code proposal). If we can't get automatic funding controls that respond to market conditions, then at minimum we need mandatory transparency reports and proper community audits before any proposal gets to auto-renew. Because right now we're just sitting here watching the treasury bleed out while everyone pretends it's fine.
It's not fine.