Key Takeaways:

1. Hive remains one of the few truly community-driven blockchains — no CEO, no foundation, no VC control — making it an example of real decentralization in today’s Web3.
2. The XT × Hive AMA explored Hive’s performance-boosting November upgrade, trustless HBD stablecoin, and the diverse earning paths available to new users.
3. Hive‘s Core Operations Crimsonclad shared why Hive’s governance model stays resilient, and how it plans to grow through cross-chain integrations and user expansion in 2026.

In a Web3 landscape shaped by corporate-backed chains and VC influence, Hive stands out as one of the rare networks that has remained fully community-driven from day one. With no foundation, no CEO, and no gatekeepers, Hive has spent years building a self-sustaining onchain ecosystem — from social platforms and creator tools to its own stablecoin economy.

In this XT.COM AMA on November 10, we sat down with Crimsonclad, who leads Core Operations at Hive, to unpack how a truly decentralized network scales in today’s competitive environment.

Throughout the conversation, we explored Hive’s history, its upcoming performance-focused upgrade in November, the design of HBD stablecoin, and the many earning paths available to new users.

XT now supports HIVE spot trading and futures trading, giving you flexible ways to engage with Hive’s thriving social and stablecoin economy.

Spot trading: HIVE/USDT

Futures trading: HIVE/USDT Perpetual

More information about HIVE price.

— Rachel Ong (@1r033r0), Host at XT.COM

— Crimsonclad (@Crimsonclad), Core Operations at Hive

How did your Web3 journey begin, and how has your role in Hive shaped the ecosystem?

My name is Crimsonclad. I am a contributing or core community member with the Hive blockchain. And we don’t have any corporate structure, so it means that everybody who works inside our ecosystem starts voluntarily and finds something to do.

I personally am a huge crypto enthusiast. I got into crypto around 2015 and I started out with Ethereum and Bitcoin. And around the end of 2016, I heard, oh, hey, there’s this new social media platform that you can join and you could potentially earn some crypto. And that got my attention. So I checked this legacy platform out and it became sort of all-consuming.

The legacy chain for Hive was called Steem. And it had a similar idea — you could come and be involved in Web3 social media, and you could potentially earn some rewards. And that was it.

So as I was trying to understand that, I started learning about how blockchain worked. I started learning about blockchain code. I started reviewing Hive’s open-source code, or Steem’s open-source codebase. Once I started reviewing the code, I thought, well, boy, I’d better run a node because that’s how you decentralize a network. So I became a node runner.

Once I was running a node, I became a consensus block producer. So now I am actually responsible for people around the blockchain for helping secure the network. And from there, I began taking on more and more work helping people get educated about why blockchain is important. And it has now become that I am always doing this kind of education and outreach.

Could you share what makes Hive’s governance structure and community model truly decentralized, and how that has helped it stay strong and independent over time?

There is no founder, there’s no foundation, there are no VCs, there’s no corporate control.

But one of the important parts of where Hive came from is that our blockchain was actually created out of the world’s biggest and most famous 51% attack. The legacy blockchain Steem existed, and at that time there was a huge development fund held by a company called Steemit Inc. And the long and the short of it is that when that company sold that development fund, the buyer used it along with exchange funds to essentially attack the network, install their own block producers, and basically remove all decentralization.

We realized we couldn’t do anything to wrest control away from them. And in 2020, Hive actually forked away from Steem.

So everybody who builds in the Hive ecosystem has a really strong ideology. We care about money. Yes, we care about currency — but we came from nothing. And we came from the shared ideology that decentralization matters.

It means that there’s grassroots, open-source code development — all of the people working on the code are community members. It means that we have an onchain feedback loop. So if we’re building something or there’s a feature that needs to be made, people can go onto the chain, write content, talk to developers, and give feedback directly on what’s being developed.

What are the major highlights of the November upgrade, and how will it improve the experience for builders and users across the ecosystem?

So often, when we have hard forks — because that’s how we do upgrades in our system — it is a hard fork where everybody starts using the new code, and the witnesses that are running it get voted in by all the users. So this upgrade that is coming on November 19th is an awesome one, but it is really talking about performance. Hive already has a lot of features, and many of them are already specifically directed toward making end users’ lives better and also making it so that dApps can offer more stuff.

This upgrade that’s coming is now about performance from the base layer up. So node runners — specifically exchanges, partners, anybody working with the very base layer 1 core code — it is faster and lighter, which is the biggest thing. This is one of the biggest ones. In the new year, it will likely be possible to run a full Hive node even from a phone or a 4GB RAM Raspberry Pi, which is pretty unprecedented in this space because for most people, or most blockchains, that’s like a cloud miner — you’re not actively decentralizing the network. So that is huge.

But otherwise, a lot of it really has to do with making it faster and easier to spin up nodes, making it faster and easier to go get information and use it on websites or things like that. We have light accounts, which are also going to be coming — that’s part of some of the work being done — which means you won’t have to have your own personalized wallet address on Hive, but that things like dApps or services will be able to make light accounts for you in a sort of middleman position. That means you can onboard and offboard people really easily. So, a lot of the hard-fork fixes here are really about making it much faster and much easier to run the chain, but also to engage with the chain, which is, of course, the next part of growing the ecosystem.

We’ve already got a ton of cool features and apps, but for it to continue growing, we need to make it faster and lighter and easier — not just for end users, but for people to support the network and grow the network at the base layer as well.

Can you explain how HBD works, how it maintains its peg, and what makes it different from other stablecoins on the market?

So HBD stands for Hive Backed Dollar. And what that means is this is a stablecoin that is not being issued by, again, a centralized body outside of the chain or a foundation or a corporation. And it is not reliant on having to prove reserves because it is not pegged to gold or fiat or something controlled outside of the ecosystem. It is always worth $1 at market prices’ worth of HIVE. So what that means is whatever is backing HBD and what it is pegged to is completely controlled by the blockchain itself, trustlessly.

There are APR parameters, which means you can use HBD in on-chain yield. You can earn it by staking it.

We’ve also got different types of stabilization methods, and those are all open source and actually controlled as part of our DAO, our DHF. So we have mechanisms that run at all times inside the ecosystem that are buying, selling, and converting HBD.

And one of the things that we have that algorithmic stablecoins have not had in the past is something called the haircut rule, which basically means that HBD issuance is always being watched by the blockchain. And it’s always looking: is there enough HIVE to back this? What would happen if everybody wanted to redeem their HBD at once? It looks at the amount of HBD to HIVE and that debt ratio, and it will stop issuing new HBD if that ratio gets too high.

So what it means is that it basically takes away the opportunity for that death spiral that we’re always worried about when we think about things like Luna.

Could you give us a quick overview of the different earning paths within Hive’s ecosystem, and how new users can start benefiting from them safely?

The easiest is honestly think about what you do on the internet now. If you’ve ever used something like Reddit, if you’ve ever used something like Facebook, if you’ve ever used something like Twitter, there are equivalents on the Hive blockchain. So there are really cool front ends that start with short form content, that have long form content, and you might not be a content creator and that’s okay. Even just coming, getting involved, making friends and making comments potentially can earn money if you are, you know, commenting or you’re engaging in a real way, the person who created content may choose to reward you with some HIVE.

So then, you could become a content creator. And maybe that means that you wanna write big, long travel blogs and you wanna post them to something like TravelFeed or you wanna pin them to the world map, in World Map, or maybe you wanna do reviews, you wanna post video. I see 3speaktv in the chat. That’s a really cool video-centric front end. Maybe you want to create content that is onchain polling, or maybe you even work in another ecosystem and you want to share another game that you play with, you wanna bring that over and you wanna talk about it on, you know, a Web3 social media.

Then of course, you’ve got gaming and services. So there’s a ton of cool stuff. And one of the fastest and easiest ways to get into Hive would be to come through one of our games. And many of you might be familiar with Splinterlands, which is one of the biggest Web3 games in the world. They’ve been running the longest. They’re really just taking off these days.

If you’re not a gamer or content creator, then of course we’ve talked a little bit about HBD. So there is the DeFi and the financial side of things. So if you’re a trader or a speculator or you just wanna earn yield, then HBD for you is the easiest entry point.

And then of course, if you wanna do things on hard mode, you can come in. You can really start learning about the ecosystem, you can decide to get into node running, you can create a dApp or develop a service, or you could even look at building a reputation for yourself and potentially wanting to contribute to the ecosystem and maybe make a proposal.

What are Hive’s biggest goals for 2026? Are there specific initiatives or opportunities you’d like developers, creators, or investors to explore?

So for 2026, our goal in the ecosystem is to get more users. Because let’s face it, attention economy is a big one. And we’ve got all these incredible tools and we’ve got an awesome set. I think there’s about two and a half million wallets now.

But obviously, we want growth. We want to see more people engaging with and using all the cool stuff we’ve built. So 2026 is going to be a year where we are bringing more people into the ecosystem.

We especially want not just end users, but also dApps and services because we are now at a time where cross-chain is everything. People are finally starting to realize that it makes sense to use all of the chains that you want. So we’re actively also looking for games and services in other social media that want to integrate Hive.

It’s an open-source stack. It’s free to use. We want to start making other apps better because there’s a lot of stuff that Hive does that other chains don’t — and vice versa.

And of course, a lot of that will be upcoming DeFi as well.

Because yes, on layer1, Hive doesn’t use smart contracts, and that’s very purposeful. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a lot of really interesting layer twos that are being developed inside the Hive ecosystem, that are creating bridges to other ecosystems — EVM and SVM. Really interesting DeFi solutions, really interesting information-passing and light account systems that are all being built on L2.

So 2026 for me — I love this word, it’s a little silly, but I use it a lot — is thinking automatically. We want people to engage with stuff that is powered by Hive. They don’t even necessarily need to know it. We want to make other chains better, other services better. We want to welcome new users, and we want to hit that growth point because from a tech standpoint, we’re killing it and it’s been awesome.

So now the big thing is sharing with more people, getting more people into the ecosystem and getting them to use our stuff. And also taking all this really cool open-source tech we built and sharing it with other services, other chains, other developers — and really growing the whole space.

About XT.COM

Founded in 2018, XT.COM is a leading global digital asset trading platform, now serving over 12 million registered users across more than 200 countries and regions, with an ecosystem traffic exceeding 40 million. XT.COM crypto exchange supports 1,300+ high-quality tokens and 1,300+ trading pairs, offering a wide range of trading options including spot trading, margin trading, and futures trading , along with a secure and reliable RWA (Real World Assets) marketplace. Guided by the vision “Xplore Crypto, Trade with Trust,” our platform strives to provide a secure, trusted, and intuitive trading experience.