What is Hive SBI?
Hive Stake Based Income (Hive SBI) is an account-based curation program. You sponsor accounts for regular ongoing curation, and then you receive back curation rewards as upvotes on your own content. This empowers both accounts to earn a sustainable crowdfunded basic income.
Members regularly accrue pending balance, and when their pending upvote balance is high enough, they receive an upvote on their latest post (or next post if their latest post is older than 24 hours), from one or more of our curation accounts.
Tokenization is Here
A few days ago, we announced tokenization on Hive Engine. These tokens do not (yet) have any usefulness other than allowing you to cash out any redeemable value.
Sunsetting the Refund Policy
Our old refund policy was long and complicated. In short, it locked the sponsee value (sponsees could not redeem) and allowed the sponsor to redeem only 1/2 of the enrollment value. From there, it pro-rated votes received at 1/4 of their value. Once you received more than 4x the enrollment amount in vote value it marked against your eligible refund. And you had to be initially enrolled before the hardfork that originated Hive to actually qualify (although in practice we have waived this requirement for all requests received in the last two years).
Confusing, right?
The 'cash-out value' that is now available to members using the automated tools we just released is greater than the refundable amount in all cases, so we are able to sunset the refund policy.
Automated Refund Steps
To tokenize your Hive SBI voting units, send 0.001 HBD per unit to 
sbi-tokens in the transaction memo. This will transfer your voting units to 
If you have fewer than 5 Hive SBI voting units, please send 0.005 HBD still. Any smaller value than 0.005 HBD is handled as a transaction memo and not an auto-transfer, as most wallet spam is in this micro-transaction range.
These transactions are processed as part of our enrollment cycle that runs every 2.4 hours. If you don't get your tokens right away, please don't panic! If it has been more than 2.4 hours, let us know in our Discord and we will look into it.
Refreshing the Buy-Wall
If you try to sell your tokens on Hive Engine and there is not enough liquidity at the buywall price of 0.475, please let us know and we will refresh it.
Hive SBI Enrollment
To curate accounts using Hive SBI, enrollment is pretty straightforward:
Just send 1 HIVE to @steembasicincome. Include the name of a Hiver to sponsor in the transaction memo (preceded by @). You and the person you sponsor will each receive 1 unit in the program. You can sponsor any active Hiver (except for yourself), it does not have to be a current member.
This is an open-access program. You do not already have to be a Hive SBI member to enroll by sponsoring another Hive account.
The official currency for enrollment is HIVE. HBD transactions are only accepted for auto-transfer functions, not for member enrollment. Enrollments are processed automatically every 144 minutes.
Most questions are addressed in our FAQ. If you still have questions, ask in the comments section or join us in our discord channel.
You can check your member levels at https://www.hivesbi.com/ These metrics only show your internal Hive SBI voting units. They do not include any HSBI tokens that you may hold on Hive Engine.