I strongly recommend you read about the Stewards of Gondor. That program required no disbursement of funding at all. It was entirely done through modest delegations of ~5k. The Stewards were charged simply with upvoting content they liked, and cheaters that circlejerked or voted their own content (or their bots) were easily and quickly undelegated without substantial financial loss - because they were not given a plug nickel to steal.

It worked great and that is why it was never actually enacted, because it encouraged creators and made them more difficult to flag off the platform. That is exactly what we need to do to improve user retention and grow Hive.