In recent days much has been written about the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF). In what is undoubtedly a harsh assessment, I would have to categorize many of those recent posts I read as “emotional bile” albeit often well-meant. Sadly enough, it seems it is an attitude which over the last years has taken root and tends to guarantee prime spotlight attention. Amplified by the megaphones known as “social media” and “free speech”.
Hang on, don’t leave yet because I was a little harsh. Hear me out!
Nevertheless, I tend to read all of it which comes my way as I find it important to understand where people come from and how we could possibly change things before gathering a reputation of being a “hostile community”. Because, as mentioned before, almost all of it is well-meant and also meant to “toughen up” the thinking of our community. I understand the root of many of those posts.
One of the more neutral and interesting posts I read was 
I disagree.
Looking at the active proposals at the moment of writing this post, only 6 proposals are currently being funded. Which means that the popular OpenSeed proposal, backed by a team with both knowledge and staying power, isn’t funded. The popular Hive interface Peakd proposal isn’t funded anymore either. Even the almost ended Keychain development proposal isn’t funded anymore.
Despite an available budget of close to 5,000HBD/day, right now less than 20% of the available funding is being used because the return proposal has set the threshold for proposal approval (funding) at more than 23 million HP.
The DHF Should Actively Fund and Support Projects
While the Return Proposal is an important tool, we shouldn’t weaponize it and raise the barrier to entry too high.
The DHF is an (almost) unique asset to our keychain and can be a powerful weapon to attract quality projects and also (core) developers. It is important that devs and project founders know that they can actually successfully raise support, and funds, using the tool without needing to invest months into campaigning within the chain’s ecosystem in order to reach the threshold and get funded.
A perfect example here is the 
The proposal is still not funded, and around 10 million HP short of being funded. That’s one 
Basically, this means that the community does NOT care about a better mobile experience and would rather save those 30HBD and continue with the available options.
Or maybe, maybe the community has actually expressed its desire to see this proposal happen but the threshold to funding is too high?
Do we think that sets a great example to attract more devs and new projects which wish to make use of our DHF, our secret dark horse weapon, or does it mean we are “failing” somewhere?
Rethinking the Return Proposal and DHF Support
In an ideal world, I would prefer the Return Proposal to be much lower - somewhere around 13-15 million HP - and the community to be more dynamic in supporting smaller budget projects.
Even if the team behind the proposal may still be unproven within our ecosystem. Especially if the team behind the proposal is still unproven within our ecosystem.
While it is rather easy to support projects by top witnesses or community leaders, even if of much higher funding value, if the Return Proposal is backed too heavily we risk excluding ourselves from attracting new devs and projects because they simply can’t get the support required for their proposal to be funded.
When “protective territorialism” becomes a story of shooting oneself in the foot.
The Kickstart Effect
When new projects join the chain and introduce their project, their introduction and a possible first low value proposal will serve them as “validation”. A signal our community sends them that not only do we welcome their idea but also want to see it happen, happen on our chain.
This is an important psychological message we send the team. A first degree of success for them, which will make them appreciate our chain, and its mechanics, even more.
By funding a proposal such as the dapplr proposal, we don’t hurt ourselves spending 30HBD/day. Besides, we can always unvote the proposal again if after some weeks the team has gone MIA.
But more important than the risk of losing potentially 1,800HBD before unvoting the proposal en masse, is the good vibes and future word of mouth the funding may generate.
No project built on any platform is guaranteed to succeed. With a daily DHF budget of close to 5,000HBD/day currently, we are not going to fund many 6-digit wages. Neither can it support projects with aggressive user acquisition.
Taking a “punt” on a new project has many more positive elements than setting our default threshold for funding too high.
Imagine the project succeeds and delivers an initial release, followed by a second proposal. The second proposal being of a much more significant value and allowing the project’s team to focus a set amount of hours every day on building the best possible product, dapp they can. Because their initial release earned them their “medals on our battlefield”, and much community love as well as appreciation of the biggest whales, the second proposal gets funded easily and swiftly.
Queue Hive’s PR machine, as well as the team writing on their own social channels off-chain, and suddenly we have a successful DHF story being covered on all crypto news outlets.
Of course, such success story will attract our chain many more eyeballs, devs, and also users. Because on Hive the community makes the difference and supports positivity.
On Hive there’s success stories.
Let’s not weaponize the return proposal too heavily and let’s make sure that new projects, proposals can focus mostly on building rather than needing to campaign for months.
As a community we should be able to easily support and fund projects like the dapplr proposal within days only, generating a success vibe on Hive.
Let’s start using the DHF to actually support efforts and turn it in a general success stories. Even if there will be failures... we’re all here for the wins. Wins created by community support.
Apologies for possible typos and possibly few missing words here and there as my eye sight is still heavily impaired and I’m still coming to grips with using my devices in this “new normal” for me.