Every few months I like to write a reminder about something that tends to slip off people’s radar: the DHF proposals and the return proposal.
Actually, I see my last post on this subject was Sept of last year. Wow — I’m overdue!
The Problem Killing Hive
If you’ve never voted on DHF proposals, it’s worth taking five minutes to look. Go to the DHF proposals page and scroll through. You’ll probably find a few that are reasonable and others that make you shake your head. cough rally car cough. The truth is that millions of HIVE flow through the Decentralized Hive Fund every month — and most Hivers have no idea where it’s going.
We like to think of the DHF as a brilliant system for community funding, and in theory it is. But in practice, it’s bleeding us dry. The more HIVE the DHF distributes, the more sell pressure we create. That’s basic math. Those payouts eventually hit the market, and when they do, the price falls. (They pay in HBD, but most of the recipients instantly convert that to HIVE to sell.)
This isn’t just theory — it’s what we’ve been seeing for months. Hive’s chart looks like a slow leak, and a big part of that leak is the DHF. 
The Return Proposal
That brings us to the return proposal. This is why the return proposal exists: to act as a brake.
When you upvote the return proposal, you’re voting to send unallocated DHF funds back into the treasury instead of dumping more HIVE onto the market. It’s not anti-growth, it’s pro-discipline.
The return proposal should always be near the top of everyone’s list. Upvote it first, then vote on the others. If a project truly deserves funding, it’ll rise above that bar naturally. If not, it shouldn’t be spending our collective resources.
Let’s say that again: The return proposal should be as high as possible. If a project wants free money, they need to prove it to the majority of Hive — and even then, it should be a challenge to get that fere money. These need to be damn good projects that can prove to us they will actually help. Not cough throwing away money on a stupid car cough.
As I write this, the return proposal sits at 44m and there are 11 proposals above it. I think it should be a lot higher with fewer proposals above it.
If you agree — go vote.
So here’s your call to action:
- Visit PeakD’s proposal list.
- Browse briefly and actually read instead of just voting on names you kind of sort of recongize.
- Upvote the return proposal.
- Revisit every week or two. New proposals pop up all the time.
If Hive wants to be sustainable, we need to stop the financial hemorrhaging. Let’s make funding very fucking hard again — because only when funding is hard will quality rise to the top.
And it starts with you clicking one small upvote. Do it here.
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |