Our primary goal now is to build good products that bring value to Hive.

Awesome.

It's part of our long term vision to create a token for powering DAO activities and running higher level governance on the network.

Here is perhaps an alternative approach. The L1 tokens can be used for L2 governance. The L2 rules can specify any arbitrary rules for what an account has to do with its L1 tokens in order to participate in the L2 governance. Just like you did with HBD for gas - no need to create another gas token, simply define the rules for what to do with your HBD in order to get gas. Same concept can be applied to governance. Any arbitrary locking period, burning penalties, whatever you want. If multiple projects did this instead of making their own L2 tokens, it would create a huge use case for the L1 token, and the ecosystem and each of these projects would be in an enormously stronger position because of it. What do you think?