Hive is going through an important phase of reflection around sustainability, funding efficiency, and long-term economic balance. As an infrastructure project supported by the DHF, it is important for us to clearly communicate how Hive Keychain uses its funding and the resources required to operate and evolve such a critical piece of ecosystem infrastructure. For that reason, we chose to communicate through this blog post rather than participate in the recently proposed live meeting format for DHF projects. The scheduled time, unfortunately, conflicts with our availability, and more importantly, we believe written communication allows broader and more accessible outreach. A post can be read at any time, shared easily across platforms, and revisited by community members who prefer reading and analyzing information at their own pace rather than watching a live video.
In this post, we explain what it truly costs to operate and maintain Hive Keychain, and how we are working to use those resources as efficiently as possible while continuing to deliver everything promised in our current proposal. Ultimately, decisions about funding levels belong to the community, but we believe it is essential that those decisions are made with a clear understanding of the work being delivered and the resources required to sustain it.
1. Why Transparency Matters
We believe that Hive Keychain plays a foundational role in the ecosystem. We power daily logins, transactions, swaps, developer integrations, and cross-platform access through both the extension and mobile apps.
Because our work directly impacts the usability and stability of Hive, we want to clarify the following:
What resources are required to maintain and improve Keychain
How DHF funds are allocated
What steps are we taking to operate more efficiently
We take our responsibility seriously. Sustainability is not just a network-level conversation; it’s also a project-level commitment.
2. What Our Current Proposal Is Delivering
Our 2025 development proposal is focused on strengthening Hive Keychain as the core infrastructure for the ecosystem and connecting it with the entire crypto industry. The scope of work includes continued development and maintenance of the browser extension and mobile applications, full compatibility with Hive hardfork updates, expansion and refinement of the SDK and developer tooling, ongoing improvements to the Playground and documentation, performance and stability enhancements, security-focused upgrades, and deeper ecosystem integrations such as swaps, multisig support, and advanced transaction types. The proposal also covers active developer support, partnership coordination, and ensuring that Keychain remains a reliable signing standard for dApps across Hive.
Here are a few examples of what we have accomplished lately:
- Improved Navigation & Gestures, Enhanced Favorites & History Management, and Dynamic Hive Engine RPC
- VSC Requests for developers using our SDK(Beta)
- Added 5 new languages in both extension and apps.
- Keyless Mode
- Account recovery and change key tool
- New biometric system that included a huge code refactor
- Change your PIN feature, requested by the community, arrived after completing the previous refactor.
- Started the integration of several swap providers for non-Hive cryptos
- Integrate the new changes of the HF28 into our platforms and SDK
- Download Media and Find in Page features
- New Playground and more Hive request added to our SDK
- Shortcuts for the superusers
- Many other development efforts can be seen as minor details in all of the updates from above, like small improvements in UI, performance, and security.
There is still much more coming in 2026 for our team. Here are a few items what remains on our to-do list from the current proposal:
- Push notification and a better configuration with templates for notifications
- Add a ticker and graph to token pages
- Uniform warning system for dApps requests and Keychain pop-up, using badges that we started developing for EVM
- Contact list
- Implementing community feature requests (we always listen, so keep it coming Hivers)
- Integrating the Hive Debit Card (currently waiting for their API)
This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Users who follow us closely know that a big part of our focus has shifted to EVM chains support. Having a way for us to reach more users outside of the Hive blockchain not only helps us but also helps Hive and any dapp to gain more users. It would be the easiest way for anyone to explore all of our Ecosystem, that include all the DApp where Hive Keychain is available as a login method. It would also mean a bigger exposure for Hive and HBD, which will come with an easy way to swap to our native tokens, no matter which chain they use in Keychain. Hive will keep being the core of Keychain, so anyone will see it as an intrinsic part of it and get curious about it for sure. That is where gamification will help the new users to find their path to Hive.
Hive Keychain will expand, but it is not just for us; it is also for Hive. We can't be a remote island anymore.
2.1 Ecosystem growth efforts
Since the start of the current proposal, 
This effort has already led to meaningful progress in establishing collaborations with several swap providers and DEX aggregators. Many of these integrations are currently pending the completion of our EVM compatibility work, which will allow us to connect Hive more easily with the broader crypto ecosystem. Some partners have already taken steps toward supporting Hive. Platforms such as Changelly and StealthEX have listed Hive for some time, while other providers are actively studying the network as part of their listing process.
The objective behind these partnerships is simple: to give users the best possible swap experience directly through Hive Keychain. By working with multiple providers, we aim to offer routing options that prioritize either the lowest rate or the fastest execution time, depending on the user’s needs. In the long term, this will allow Keychain to act as a flexible bridge between Hive and a wide range of external tokens.
These improvements will also benefit Hive’s Layer 2 ecosystem and its projects behind. As routing between providers becomes more advanced, our Swap Widget will evolve to support connections between Hive tokens, Hive L2 assets, and external crypto networks. This will make it easier for L2 projects to integrate swaps into their own applications. We are also exploring how collaborations with projects such as 
Beyond swaps, our outreach has opened conversations with other types of crypto companies. Through continued activity on social platforms outside the traditional Hive channels, we have been approached by teams working on a new Layer 1 blockchain, crypto debit card providers, and several other infrastructure companies interested in potential collaborations. While many of these discussions are still early and cannot yet be disclosed in detail, they represent an important step in expanding Hive’s presence beyond its current ecosystem.
At the same time, these conversations also highlight one of the challenges we continue to face. Listing Hive, and especially HBD, can be technically and economically complex for many providers. Despite this, we remain committed to pushing these discussions forward and identifying partners willing to work with us to expand access to the Hive ecosystem.
One particularly promising discussion currently underway involves a large multi‑chain swap aggregator that is strongly considering adding Hive support, together with direct Hive Keychain transaction signing. If implemented, this would not only improve the swap experience for Keychain users but also bring meaningful visibility and accessibility to the Hive blockchain itself by connecting it to a much broader liquidity network. As part of our current focus on EVM, we have already signed an MOU with a new chain, which is EVM-compatible, for a future partnership.
Opportunities like this demonstrate that ecosystem outreach does not only benefit Keychain as a wallet, but can also create real infrastructure value for Hive as a whole.
3. Our Current (and Growing) Operating Costs
As things are, our operating costs are mainly payroll, followed by admin, tooling, and infrastructure. Keep in mind that these are rounded numbers.
3.1 Payroll (~85%)
As we are in active development, the bulk of our costs comes from payroll, with a team of 3 senior developers (2 full-time, 1 part-time), all on-site, completed by a CM/Ecosystem growth position, for a total of about $15,350/month.
3.2 Admin (~5%)
One major difference from other proposals is that we need a registered company to provide our services. In fact, both Apple (and more recently Google) require a registered company with a DUNS number to publish a crypto-related mobile app on iOS and Android. Between the offshore company that we operate for this reason and partnerships, and the local one for payroll, we spend a bit under $1,000/month for our small office rent, accounting, filings, and the occasional legal advice.
3.3 Tools (~3%)
3.3.1 AI
There have been a lot of talks about the use of AI to reduce costs recently. It's been a few months since we significantly increased our output through the use of AI coding tools. We are currently spending $440/month on these.
An important note regarding this topic, in relation to the recent meeting: I agree that in most cases, efficiency gains can reach 5 to 10x, which is also what we're experiencing in most of our repos. For the extension and mobile Apps though, I would say it's a bit lower since security is and always will be our priority. This means that part of our work there is assisted by AI rather than being driven by it, and the rest is tested more extensively.
3.3.2 HR, Productivity, and CM tools
Additional subscription-based tools for our HR (Tellent), image creation (Canvas), X for CM work, and project management (ClickUp) cost around $130/month.
3.4 Infrastructure (~2%)
Our infrastructure accounts for a small part of our budget at around $400/month.
This covers servers and related infra for Keychain API, Keychain swap backend and widget, our landing page, Hive Multisig frontend and backend, and our own dashboard to keep an eye on things. We save money by hosting small tools that we provide as part of the Hive ecosystem on GitHub pages ( Account recovery tool, SDK Playground, etc.)
3.5 Miscellaneous (~5%)
This part can vary quite a bit depending on what we are doing at the moment and the status of the market. It is not uncommon to lose around 2% on swaps/conversions to pay the salaries. It also allows us to have some money aside for rewarding translators, extra dev work, and for testers (this will be important for our EVM alpha phase). Less common, but this also covers the occasional event, contest, or needed equipment.
4. Making money, the forgotten question?
If we don't want to keep relying on the DHF, we need to make money on our own, and for a wallet, the best way is to generate revenue through swaps, on/off ramps, and bridges. We understood that early and developed Keychain Swap years ago. We are blessed to be trusted by many of you for your daily swaps, but our ecosystem's volume remains too low for it to amount to a significant income.
That brings us to EVM integration. Besides onboarding more users to Hive, our second objective is to propose more of these services across other chains and start generating enough money to stand on our own two feet. That's why we are working on a swap/bridge/ramps aggregator that will work on Hive and our supported EVM chains.
5. How are we optimizing our resources?
As mentioned above, cutting some of the development costs in favor of AI tooling allowed us to greatly improve our output.
We will have to continue reducing our development costs in the coming months to allocate some budget for the EVM deployment while avoiding increasing our DHF spending. Indeed, EVM will come along with more infra costs (we are creating our own light node as a way to quickly provide tokens/nft discovery, history, gas price, smart contract information and more), increased spending on third-party APIs (though the whole point of our light node is to reduce this cost, it will still be non-negligible), and a bigger ecosystem growth budget once the feature is in production. That's around $1,500 that will be taken from our development budget.
We are only a couple of months away (hopefully one month away for a closed alpha) from having an EVM-compatible Keychain extension that will both increase our operating costs and our ability to generate revenue. That's why we don't think now is a good time to make a significant reduction in our spending.
That being said, once we start generating revenue, we will be able to slowly reduce our reliance on the DHF, up to, hopefully, the point where we won't need it anymore.
Conclusion (by 
)
As I've been saying during the HiveFest, I don't think we necessarily need to spend less; we need to spend better and smarter. Ask yourself which projects bring value to Hive and/or have the potential to bring value to Hive in terms of user base and market cap.
Which ones have a good potential for making money in the future instead of staying reliant on the DHF?
Does the chain need to reduce the inflation? Sure.
Is reducing the DHF spending the solution? Part of it, but so is reducing the HBD APR.
Does reducing inflation alone fix the HIVE price? I don't think so.
Without bridging Hive to the broader ecosystem to attract more users and investment, I don't see any green candle on the horizon. More transparency and accountability for DHF-funded projects are definitely needed going forward, and the AI summary tool discussed in the meeting is a great step towards it. At the same time, let's be careful not to turn this into a crusade that would stifle development if we want to succeed. There will be no improvement without development and marketing.
All download links are available on our landing page. For mobile, you can use the links below:
To import accounts quickly from your Hive Keychain extension to your mobile App, use the QR Code scanner by pressing the QR code logo:
On your extension, navigate to the menu (top right button), then to Manage Accounts, and finally click on Show QR Code.
Discord
To communicate with us or become a Beta tester, join our Discord by following this link :
https://discord.gg/3EM6YfRrGv
Or scanning this QR Code :
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