No EVM or smart contract compatibility is probably the single biggest barrier to Hive being adopted and has been for years now.

Ethereum has Solidity. Solana has Rust-based programs. Both have massive ecosystems of tooling, tutorials, and developer infrastructure around their smart contract platforms.

Hive doesn't have general-purpose smart contracts at all.

Everything is built around custom operations and layer 2 solutions like Hive Engine, which is useful but nowhere close to the flexibility or composability that smart contracts offer. A developer who knows Solidity has zero transferable skills to Hive. That's a massive friction point.

That's not to say that we have to ditch the current custom JSON operation approach, but layer 2 solutions are a bandaid, not a true solution to the smart contract difference compared to other blockchains.

I also think our wallet and tooling UX is dated. Metamask, Phantom, Backpack. These wallets are polished, well-known, and integrate with thousands of apps. Hive Keychain works and stoodkev did solid work, but it doesn't have the same level of polish or recognition. The account creation process alone, with keys and resource credits and account names, is confusing for people coming from other chains where you just install a wallet and go.

And one of the bigger things is we have noo mindshare in the broader crypto developer community.

Solana and Ethereum have hackathons, grant programs with serious money behind them, accelerators, VC ecosystems feeding into them, and cultural presence on crypto Twitter. Hive has a loyal community, but outside of that community, most crypto developers have either never heard of it or think of it as "that old Steem fork for blogging." That perception problem is real and it compounds everything else.

We could easily fund these efforts. Heck, if I knew there was the opportunity to me to be able to work on these efforts and get funded for them, I would do it in a heartbeat. I build fun tools and dApps for Hive, but large and ambitious things we actually need require time and for many of us, we're working other jobs so that time needs to be funded. Right now where do devs go to even get funding for these things, a proposal that won't be seen?