The Quasi Traditional Yearly Epic: Grateful Reflections and Tough Questions for Myself (and You) 8 Years On

With another year behind us, and it being one that has been both my proudest and my most earth shattering, it's time to really think about what's next for me here on Hive.

As has become a somewhat comforting standard that you can rely on, I have been writing versions of this post for more than a year, and am now releasing it well after my official Hiversary has come and gone. I think if there's one thing we've all got, it's my wit charm sick metal shirt collection steadfast consistency.

After much consideration, my 2024 in review coming to completion closer to the end of 2025 feels exactly like it should.

I've had time to think deeply, to allocate myself wholly to the people and projects who need me most, and have taken ample opportunity to compose myself well enough to come back and chat with you guys about all the things I want to express. I have to thank Hive as being a place where that's been possible for more than 8 years now, even if it's also been the reason that I've been reduced down to year-posting in general.

Usually, these pieces are sassy and funny (largely because I can't turn off being a smartass), or

(since there's no removing my bleeding heart either.) They often shine a spotlight on the truthful lows that come alongside the accomplishments and the highs that I get to share with everyone around me here. This is the fascinating history that is cemented alongside developing a quasi-public, partially private, downplayed open book community status and persona. Our chain is a beautiful timestamped mess of successes and failures and encapsulations of overflowing emotion and unwavering, unbiased data flow.

talked about how I worry that I don't do enough to highlight to the broader Hive cohort what I volunteer to take on day to day, and lamented a little bit about how in embracing my role as "everyone's Crim" is challenging, absorbing, awesome, and also has singularly destroyed my ability to keep up with producing beautiful long form written and visual content as a personal creator first and foremost.

spoiler alert:

I have editorial content drafts that are six years old... that shit hasn't changed, made you look lol

In all honesty, over the past year I've found that people at events with me or here on chain will actually write posts about what I'm doing before I'm even finished the event or I know it's happening — it feels stupid to repeat what someone else has already said, and I see no reason to have the chain pay out for that twice, so I know that oft times contributes to my radio silence. I staunchly believe you're probably going to get a better recounting of things (without my personal bias) from another community member, so I think it's probably a feature and not a bug when you consider it from an overall standpoint. I snooze, I lose! Also, I can't believe how much people here care that they're willing to write about the things I do, and they should be supported and celebrated for that. It's shit for my earnings, if we're being honest, but I'm a dumb dumb on this and we all accept it.

As such, the overarching theme of today's post is really, "what's in your control, what is not, and what do you want to do with it?" This is really, really, REALLY long, and I'm not going to soften the blow with pictures like I normally do because eventually we'll get to talking about stuff that only some people will want to either rip apart or push to happen. I fully recognize that if you want to stop reading now, you can. We've said hello and established a new year. As you were.

So now that we've had the jokes and the recap aside, we've set the tone for

✅ The Good

If I were a smart woman, I would really pad this section out and go into hefty detail to really underline my worth to the chain and better explain how awesome I am. However, we've established that this makes me super uncomfortable and I suck at it unless I'm actively preparing review and success documentation for an employer, and other than content, there's no pay here. Tooting my own horn for free is a skill I haven't mastered and I don't know if I have the energy for. I'm amazing with people. I'm technical and straightforward; I'm persuasive and a good listener. I build functional teams, make shoestring budgets into banquets, and everywhere I go to speak, I get an open invite to come back and talk again, often ending up with groups of people coming up to express their enjoyment and interest in what we're doing, giving me the opportunity to sink my hivey little hooks into them. Some events now tap me early to make sure I can come out to help with moderating panels, do side activations, or create media content with them. I've turned people pitching our builders on something into contacts making appointments to learn more about whether or not they can build Hive into their own thing or switch their stack. Often, the only thing that stretches these connections is simply the fact that we haven't actually delivered on some of the pieces we need to branch across the gaps between ourselves and the "standardized" _VM experiences. I travel like a skinflint while presenting as c suite professional, use my own personal and career resources to be flexible, save a ton of money and time, and live out of a backpack with little requirements because a lot what I've built from the ground up is well suited to the task. In general, I'm okay with saying I'm a catch.

♦️ keynotes, talks, appearances, spaces, podcasts, presence: as before, I do in person and voice and video outreach, education, devrel and bizdev on average three to six times a week. In 2024 alone, 100% of my personal, paid vacation time from my IRL career was given freely and spent fully on just live in person stuff for Hive— above and beyond remote and online tasks; well over a full month of just beeing^{[intentional]} accessible 24/7 all over the world, vocal and charismatic about what we're doing here and why it matters, as well as pulling people, projects and events into our orbit and forcing their hands into the tech. This has replaced my great love of personal and adventure travel, which I'm chewing over currently, but also my downtime, or anything I want to pursue in my life that isn't Hive.
♦️ exchanges, partnerships, and longevity work: we continue to secure exchanges, but also to negotiate with and step away from listings and partners whose profit models are based on wringing every penny they can out of a chain and community rather than enfolding users and products into a sustainable portfolio. A lot goes into keeping our biggest exchanges happy, and while we cannot kowtow to them, we also need to have a good understanding that a portion of our price lives or dies by their sword. How do we work with and influence them, while maintaining relevance? (Coin death stats are STAGGERING from the past two years alone. Even the ex-Inc team have sadly had to move on from their own well built and well hyped project, which is a great example of how even a proven project team with an enthusiastic built in day one community simply isn't enough and a huge warning.) How do we keep bringing on new alternatives and up and coming CEXes without paying listing fees or extortion costs? Turns out, pretty well, though I know it's at a rate that feels slow when compared to the speed run nuclear explosions that are the pump.fun style daily runners who spend coordinated cabal money and fiddle like Nero through the flames on to the next grift.

Understanding that success without straight up paying double digit millions for it is to understand that we need to build strong, decentralized and open source tools here to get ready to take over, but that we also need to meet industry players and our emerging crypto-centric (as opposed to web3 enjooooyer) potential audience where they are at. I'm madly proud of the fact that we slowly roll forwards picking up more and more institutional options without selling our souls or our treasury, and have been building heavily towards major US contacts and listings via my contacts and persistence (everyone's; this is no one-man show.) But it means being up at 3am, taking calls and soothing feelings, being firm with our ideologies and negotiations covered by a velvet glove; standing ground while maintaining charm and continuing to build trust without hurting fragile feelios is a fascinating, exhausting, and fruitful position. The pile of DEXes and _VM compatible wallets and services who are champing at the bit to work with us is a hefty portion of my rolodex, much to my ongoing consternation that I have to 🔜™️ them and eat the dog food on it.

♦️ community outreach and the attempt to enmesh likeminded tech and chains: this year was really earmarked by going out and finding more ways to work with other chains to ideally have them begin by creating wallets here, by posting and creating communities, and by hopefully helping them use some of our social tech as the web3 homebase for their own ideological tech. The future is multichain, and our strengths can be leveraged and used by others to build a suite of tools, or at least an interconnected presence, that helps Hive become more entrenched as an opensource OG that everyone should know about. More work with Dash, Digibyte, LTC, Namada, wallets like Zypto, our swap partners releasing content on chain and beyond: getting outside ecosystems using our tech feels like a spot where we really need to double down and be less insular. More work on this on the way, but some of the relationships built here and as part of point number one are pretty incredible and I'm proud of that too.

♦️ my quarterly test of taking over full time on the X feed: Sometimes I'm more than just a walking credit card (though it is indeed often my credit card often gets used) and good social media is unequivocally full time work. For a few months I did some careful engagement testing and daily posting alongside everything else I was taking on. We saw our numbers skyrocket, some awesome interactions, and I was able to work a lot of the above points into a bigger vision for making the Hive account a living, breathing crypto identity. However, this is something that simply couldn't have the time and effort kept up at that level without it at least having a defined position and some remuneration for the insane hours, planning and off the cuff monitoring of b2b and customer service alongside trends, and voice and target execution. I still help with it, but direction on where people want my time spent in the future is tabled until the end of this post.
♦️ continuing to push for new ways to change and enhance the ideology of the DHF: for many years, I've been trying to persuade, cajole, and push people into making more and smaller proposals overall. The need for bigger and longer term outcomes makes sense in some instances (especially CEX b2b) but also has hampered our ability to get little things done. I've long been begging for people to try out alternative models like the plug-in, where they make a proposal for a smaller amount and have it voted on separately so that there is a sense of community sentiment and a siloing out of relevant feedback, but also to allow an outside body to help track receipts and spending or develop a deliverables rubric.

I've made a strong effort to try to get outside entities to approach the DHF and the community— not because we need to waste bribe money, but so we can start looking at making the model an attractant with a firm social and cultural baseline that projects need to match the energy of to understand their product market fit here. This isn't a complaint against funded proposals, so let's avoid the rabbit hole, and simply recognize that we need variety in what is funded which better reflects the variety of beliefs about the DHF spanning our community of stakeholders and voters. Some things will be huge. Some things will be tiny. Some things will be well defined fully transparent multi stage productions. Some will be shots in the dark and nods to the will of different groups with wildly ranging personalities agreeing on some weird little spark worth throwing something at the wall for.

From this standpoint, I want to give a huge shout out to some of my dearest friends on this chain, who actually finally went out on a limb and did the fuckin' thing. @meno took a chance on asking for a smaller amount for work he'd done on @snapie, understanding that breaking goal sets into chunks and working ahead of funding when possible was a big risk, but also aligned with his work regardless. Discussing how valuable morale improvement would be by seeing this proposal made (and ultimately passing) really underlined that there are plenty of things that could collect small bits of funding that could snowball into something truly great, and give way more room and gentle encouragement to producing things for people to try out and love, so I'm glad he pulled the trigger on it. Small dapps that come into existence with a tiny scope but that look and work beautifully need less up front, and we can take more chances on these becoming the pillars which the One Big One can potentially build atop of.

@bookerman works his ass off to create engaging real world events and activations that use our chain to pay real athletes inside of a parallel ecosystem while onramping in fiat funds, has built a functional, fun and broadly attractive game while also being really mindful of how to talk about Hive to normies, other developers, and how to couch web3 in an actual example that allows people to learn about crypto from a ton of angles that are all very engaging and keep thoughts far from the casino or scam tropes. The balls he has to make a proposal where he stumped for the votes and did all the hardass work to get it to pass, but then also voluntarily have the funds travel through VP fully outside of his control so he has accountability to a secondary whistleblower, swing low and heavy. This is a model I hope to see more of and have been pushing for: where an idea and executable have an oversight group that can help them stay on track with defining their KPIs, monitoring spending and providing guidance, and working as a trusted escrow that extends the "smart contract" style target system that can't really be utilized effectively in proposals that go far beyond verifiable code delivery. People want to be handed money, and given guidelines. They want to be hired, or to push off culpability but also to be given the funds because making your own proposal is hard as heck since we don't yet have an established culture of smaller long shots being taken. He's Hive through and through, and I'm shockingly lucky that he lets me occasionally drop in on him and ruin his life with solicited and unsolicited advice and ideas.

Plenty of groups and other chains have come and gone window shopping, having made a career of collecting magic hackathon and grant money from every entity out there while championing and supporting none, so having the Zypto team come in and say, "okay, we vibe with this chain and even though it doesn't make immediate economic sense from a userbase standpoint," while stopping what they're working on to integrate a full suite of tools and our whole ethos into their non-custodial wallet means a lot. The status quo is to simply add every new EVM/SVM/rollup and cloned unsafe bridge, because it's almost no development overhead and can be a quick buck capitalizing on hype fees for most other entrenched providers.

To have these guys recognize that the community would probably hold their feet to the fire and roast them, be willing to go thru the same process that any community member or developer would be when running the DHF gauntlet, and to take their lumps on only a partial payout under an already reasonable ask, while still delivering on a ton of things that we've never before had for our chain is really heartening. They jumped head first into our docs, have embraced the blogging tech and are thinking about how to use it in the future inside of their wallet app, well beyond the scope of the on and off ramps, KYC and no KYC cards, and non-custodial wallet management displays. They've created an additional way to create new Hive wallet addresses either with a friend's resources or by paying with any crypto or fiat you want, and really taken the time to think about how to manage an identity on chain as well as being able to align or create a seed wallet via their products so that you can utilize their services and your HIVE in whatever combination under whatever ideological guidance you see fit. I think this is a huge win for a number of reasons and is another great example from the past year or two that really highlights what we do differently and how it meshes with the wider, and hopefully continually better developing cryptospace.
♦️ plus everything I mentioned in last year's post, with this point repeated in full in the interest of brevity: if you know of more, you're welcome to fill in the blank here as you see fit. A lot of the time, I am a nag. I nag to help things get done, to help connect people to each other; you name it. Nagging may or may not be a point in the "pros" column, depending on your perspective.

https://x.com/crimsonclad/status/1911113122645180623

⛔️ The Bad

After a number of successful and awesome late spring 2025 events, the time for the end of our family palliative care battle had come. Posting personal details publicly on an immutable blockchain has always been a balancing act for me, and while I share much of myself, there's a lot I keep back in respect for my own privacy and the privacy of those I love. We can tell stories and share lives in a way that expresses our emotion and humanity, and we also can do it in such a way where it doesn't become dangerous or disrespectful... or that's been my goal anyways, from my very first days here where I thought I would be an anon documentarian and failed at it miserably almost instantly.

Many of you know, from the vagaries in my posts over the past few years or from the long term hiatus from my live shows, that I've had a number of loved ones pass in the last few years, but most horribly, that an immediate family member has had an extended and brutal battle with stage four cancer. For half a decade— the entire time of working on Hive— we've been navigating chemo and surgeries, determining how to spend time, prepare for the future, mend relationships and love each other as fiercely as possible knowing that the outcome was always that we would have to say goodbye in the prime of our lives. You can think you're ready to make peace with it all, and that you've made every preparation knowing that someone is being taken from you before they've even gotten a chance to retire, to watch their children grow up, to decide what to do with the physical and emotional trappings of their existence in the hopes of leaving something behind to be remembered, but I can say now that you probably aren't. And that's okay. I want to keep this section short because it's not fully relevant to the post at hand, but at the start of the summer we began spending full days and nights in the hospital, doing our best to be normal and laugh and put in the time for each other as every second slipped from between our fingers. This time, I didn't always choose Hive. After years of heartbreak, with this, the others, the flood from last year, and what feels like a cascading pile of bad, I have been pretty burned out.

To those of you working with me during this process who may have caught some of my raw edges as I answered you up wrapped in a musty blanket in a shitty hospital waiting room chair at three AM, I'm sorry, and I thank you for your grace. Web3 and Hive wait for no one, so in some ways, continuing to work helped, and in some ways, I'm sure for some of you it felt like I sort of disappeared off the face of the planet and I definitely resented some of the things asked of me. I simply didn't have the emotional energy to manage some of the thousands of "less critical" messages and requests and needs, and I want to underline that it doesn't mean that any of them were less relevant in actuality. Just that I was pushed to the physical and mental edge, and understanding when to step back is more effective than being shitty or doing a shitty job. This has been a lesson I've chosen to accept as a gift from this whole shitty thing. Shit shit shit. We love you, dad.

But there it is: I typed the quiet part out loud.

I have been pretty burned out.

And while it's easy to say it's a culmination of just IRL stuff, the truth is, the pace at which I've held for doing work on Hive for many years and the infrastructure I've built in my own life that I drew on to support that is unsustainable. After coming through everything and having this final experience shape my perception, as well as now stepping in to support an additional family financially who has lost a provider before his time as a cherry on top, it's time to finally man up and face the big ol' elephant in the room that many, many of you have been (positively AND negatively) yelling at me for years about.

What is the job? What is it worth? What comes closest to what the wider community really wants done, but also is willing to consider at least partially remunerating for? The questions that light everyone on chain on fire. Another fifteen or so unpublished drafts. In fact, I'm pretty sure I promised some of you that this would literally be posted in February, BEFORE my Hiversary. Same old, same old, lol.

🐝 The Bumbly

It's not ugly to ask, though for many years I've perceived finally doing it to be. I've had a deep feedback loop with almost everyone around the chain, and that has widely shaped my thoughts on what's appropriate and what to use my "influence" for, though I don't really feel that I've ever wielded that like a cudgel to get my way. In the Steem days, I turned down work from Inc, and from the "foundation," because as a consensus block producer at the time I felt strongly that I was already receiving recompense, but also that it was a huge conflict of interest. But we're a separate ecosystem, and I'm here with a half decade of proven hard work since day zero of inception. I think it's finally okay to say, "Hey listen, I've given enough now to be feel confident entering into comms about what I can take, which defines where I go with this next."

A recent message I got really made me think long and hard about the DHF; it amounted to basically, "hey, we all voted for your thing, can you now vote for ours or what?" in relation to Zypto, and I have to admit, it rankled me a little. The few proposals I've made over the years have been as an intermediary for others, where I'm clear and open that the funds aren't coming to me and that I'm helping people who don't know how or aren't ready to make a proposal approach the process. Here's a perfect encapsulation of how part of our culture is not to care that an actual job is literally to go out, to find partners, services, connections, and developers and then plonk them to work inside of our ecosystem for our benefit— rather, just doing whatever it takes to secure the personal bag and it's all just a clout trade. That might be a harsh view of it, but it's a reflection of that I've long been very wary of asking for anything because there is both a lot of support and resentment around my perceived "sway."

I simply can't keep that front of mind forever, so I've decided I'm fine with having people be concerned about it since I'm secure in the knowledge that I've built a sterling reputation on how I care and put the chain first. It makes good business sense to only direct energy to helping work through what is true. Many of you have heard it from me in person time and again: take the criticism, turn it over in your mind and your hands; determine what it holds that is valid that you can make better; take that thing and evolve; discard anything that is driven by fear, jealousy, or that is petty or indecisive or ad hominem and move on without malice. Chuck it in the fuck it bucket!

The flip side is also true. I've been pushed for years by a vast majority of users to either spin up a new consensus node or to ask for a big fat salary and go all in on Hive. I've been asked to singlehandedly spearhead a foundation. I've had proposals made for me with a blank cheque in the trust that I will go out and use them wisely! To me, this is the heart of what Hive is about. I've worked hard for you and for myself, because of the whole rising tide lifts all boats thing, and by and large now have pretty much universal unwavering support because of it. I am exceptionally mindful of making sure that I never take advantage of it, even though we've established overall that I deserve it. Just like my real career and my meatsack relationships, the way that I engage and work on and with this human chain is to always seek balance, where that all sides feel like they're being heard, fulfilled, respected, and valued fairly. It's not always possible, but it's always the goal.

I know the frustration from many, especially inside core and from projects, about not doing a proposal early on. I also know there is a thread of understanding that by not making one, I am undervaluing ALL work around the Hive ecosystem, and have helped set an overarching precedent that really doesn't make any sense, if we're being honest. But we are all here as volunteers, and we're building something that we hope will continue to grow greater than ourselves both for the ideological payout and the future gains. It's okay to recognize that our chain doesn't work like other ones, and will never reflect a financial experience that mirrors the corporate world or chains with wasteful "spend it or lose it" annual budget for profit foundations.

This is a weird place to be.

▪️Almost everyone wants you to ask for more than you think the chain can bear, because it's actually an important part of pushing the ecosystem forward.
▪️80% or so want you to speedrun top twenty to start getting paid again (I simply don't think that the metrics of great work of securing the chain should be considered against someone who also potentially is doing crazy work in BD/devrel positioning or C suite level event and outreach equivalency in meatsack world, sorry)
▪️Three people have told you that they will never, ever support a back pay proposal, and wouldn't support any form of salary to continue any of this work, even the global operations tasks that have only been possible because you leverage your career to offset not taking a salary and subsidize out of pocket every tax season and that most people don't want to do the second they find out it isn't a cool magic vacation
▪️One has even gone so far to say that if you ever are going to make a proposal, you need to make it for EVERYONE because almost all other users are actually a lot more valuable than you in the long run, and if you ever collect a penny then you've basically demoralized them all, stood on their shoulders to snatch their income and prevented them from getting anything. (I think sort of understand where this one comes from, but it's also a horrifically pessimistic view of a continual descent into a non-functioning ecosystem where people are actively terrified of trying to use the proposal system for anything, if you ask me.)

Welcome to the centre of the indecision matrix! It's a mess in here, because being mindful and trying to think through all options means you often have a pile of contradictions you inevitably must choose from.
But hopefully this helps you understand why at least twice a year I write something, erase it, and throw myself back into just doing the work. Going and spending three days awake overseas while running on coffee and one meal without ever seeing the hotel room and then getting thrown into an auditorium to fill in for an MC, pulled into four impromptu meetings and a recorded interview and then getting on to a plane and hoping you get a chance to kiss your partner hello before you're on to the next is actually sooooo much easier than worrying about what the right approach to this all is, unironically. There is great fulfillment in all of it, even if it is madcap. So, because we are a chain with a feedback loop, and because I'm now up against deciding where I will move next with my focus for my work, both on Hive and off, we come to the crux of it all. The culmination of eight years on chain and genuine ask, with or without guidance for a back or forward pay proposal alongside.

https://x.com/crimsonclad/status/1904900748615516345

What forms of future do you want to see?

The gift that Hive has given me is that I know that disruptive, blockchain, crypto and fintech matter, and while I love what I was doing and had an amazing career, I've already decided I'll be moving into this space. My expectation is not that Hive provides a job for me because I've quit and decided to go full time web3 on a whim. Rather, I've already made the commitment to this sector, so I'm willing to keep up with doing this work as is possible regardless of paid or unpaid and whatever gets said here in the comments. It could certainly mean that I take an offer from other ecosystems or from other hybrid companies and keep on doing bits and pieces of this using my personal resources, albeit it a bit more scaled back, as things have been from the start of this year. No change from how it's been, really! It could also mean that many of your previous asks I've been hesitant to commit to because they are more suited to a paid position will become viable because there's a better defined overall task with accountability or structure that I can work inside that offers both me and the chain better protections (and also to keep a roof over my head in return for being owned by the chain.) Maybe really you all hope I go away and return to being a poster and hoster and streamer who just loves Hive, instead of doing any events or outreach at all (I wouldn't be offended.)

I've spent a lot of time thinking it over and I've landed on that any big salary or heading up some sort of large department is both not a good use of funds, and also simply can't and shouldn't exist without a well defined job description and an entity to disburse it. I don't think I would want to head up the creation of a REAL foundation (like a VASP) without a big salary, as it's basically fully doxxing your entire life and blowing it all to hell to publicly take on the full weight of being responsible for and to a chain, so while I did entertain working for one here if it was made for a bit, I have mostly decided that there's not likely to be the appropriate salary to do it, even if we could create a structure that uplifted and entrenched Hive's decentralized ideology and was legally accountable to the chain and stakeholders themselves. No, mostly, it would be some small sort of backpay proposal for a portion of the past few years, and then a small dedicated stipend for continuing to do global bizdev/devrel and bringing deals and partnerships to fruition while doing talks, education, and keynotes, so that instead of living off another company's vacation pay, I'm actually just getting some fair remuneration and can afford to feed myself and my dogs.

Think of this post as my anniversary celebration, a continual reminder that getting to do all this so far has been a (challenging) joy, and an offer to be... well, whatever you want me to be, if it makes us all happy and is sustainable.
It's an ask for what you think is appropriate in terms of work done, or the work you want done, and whether or not I think I can step up to provide it and then see if I can price it out and throw it at the wall to see what sticks. It's an acknowledgement that many of you have wanted much more from me than I have previously been able to deliver without at least a bit of support to do it. Does it look like a small per year full time salaried position? Is it couple bucks that say "thanks for all the fish," and maybe we see in another five years what else has happened based on where the wind blows and if you value anything done by then at all? Do I take some of the jobs in complimentary ecosystems or with companies that I meet out and about and take advantage of the crossover if and when it happens? What you all think and want matters (to a degree, don't get big heads) as it helps me decide just how heavily and what to throw myself into as I enter what will soon be my second decade in the crypto space.

I'm immensely proud of the past few years. I'm proud to be on Hive regardless of whether or not I ever get paid, which I think is true about pretty much anyone who has ever contributed anything from content to core code. But it's time for me to rip this bandaid off, because some of my effectiveness and my personal worth has been hampered by not asking, and it's well past time to consider what we see as a viable way to supports the health of the chain by also supporting the humans ready and active in working on ways to make it even more robust. Looking forward to riling you all up either way (and giving out hugs and maple syrup) in Malaysia 🖤

Long winded and exhausting,
sort of my trademark,