I posted yesterday part I of Valueplan the Numbers for August where I delve into the payouts during the month of August. If you have not read it then the link is below along with the months preceding August.
Valueplan the Numbers July & YTD
Valueplan the Numbers June & YTD
Valueplan the Numbers May & YTD
How much is the Rally Car Costing YTD Valueplan the Numbers Jan - April Part I
Valueplan the Numbers part II: Payouts per user ranked from January 2024 - April 30th 2024
Valueplan the Numbers part III : Recipient Account Values
Valueplan the Numbers August & YTD Part I
August
Augusts payouts was much larger than previous months with a total of 196,088.00 Hive paid out and 116,654.91 HBD paid out. If we round the Hive equivalent up to the monthly average Hive price and add the HBD at peg we come to a monthly outlay of $152,441.01 gave out in August for marketing. Now 141,243.00 Hive of this is for the upcoming Hivefest so this is the reason why Valueplan have much more paid out this month.
Year To Date YTD
| Ranked | User | Project | Payout Hive | Payout HBD | Total $ YTD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | @ssekulji | Rally Car | 585,102.57 | 18,126.89 | $195,426.69 |
| 2. | @lordbutterfly | Hivefest, Vibes, Videography | 141,243.00 | 43,222.00 | $68,998.85 |
| 3. | @crimsonclad | Conferences | 216,057.28 | 22,723.43 | $110,511.84 |
| 4. | @swc-oficial | GYM Street Workout | 0 | 77,346.00 | $77,346.00 |
| 5. | @blackheart1 | Hackathons | 0 | 68,280.70 | $68,280.70 |
| 6. | @arlettemsalase | Multiple Conferences | 0 | 50,100.76 | $50,100.76 |
| 7. | @mcsamm | Community Wells Project | 0 | 48,488.00 | $48,488.00 |
| 8. | @cryptosimplify | Sports team Sponsorship | 0 | 45,705.80 | $45,705.80 |
| 9. | @sucrewallet | Hive Sucre | 0 | 44,588.00 | $44,588.00 |
| 10. | @wooconventions | Woo Wrestling | 0 | 24,180.60 | $24,180.60 |
| 11. | @hivestudentshub | Hive Student Hub | 0 | 23,074.85 | $23,074.85 |
| 12. | @qmwallet | Community Wells Project | 0 | 20,835.00 | $20,835.00 |
| 13. | @blockchainsummit | Conference | 0 | 20,200.00 | $20,200.00 |
| 14. | @victorwallet | Bike Racing & SWC crew | 0 | 20,087.00 | $20,087.00 |
We will now look at the YTD payouts per user. In total there are 61 accounts that received funding from Valueplan in 2024 ranging from the highest @ssekulji for the rally car to the lowest payout YTD to @zonahive for $140 to buy pizzas for BTC pizza day. Totals YTD spent in total are 1,013,743.05 Hive and 686,957.64 HBD.
The rally car has amounted to 585,102.57 Hive and 18,126.89 HBD Year to Date. When we put a USD figure on it he is just coming in at $195,4429.69. Just under the 200K in 8 months. It is all great and looks nice but it is a massive amount of funding for one project. The funding is 19.56% of the total Valueplan payouts without taking into account extra funding such as videography and photos etc.
The chart above shows all payouts over the $20,000 Year to Date. After the rally car we see two of the project managers top of the list for various Hive related activities. In 4th place we have the Gym Street Workout who have been funded $77,346.00 YTD. Creeping up into 5th place we have @blackheart1 getting enormous funding for his hackathons and investor meetings. I would love to see an update into all the cool things that he is doing.
Merch Merch Merch
In 6st place we have our serial conference attendee @arlettemsalase who we are paying $50,000 to so far this year to attend and manage multiple conferences. Since my post in July over lack of media surround the event , it is good to see she is posting up some content in the last month. Blockchain Rio was a success I am told by a number of people and after my post complaining about lack of social media regarding the event there were numerous posts put up about Blockchain Rio. My first thoughts were that the Hive Merch was particularly weak. They must have been on a budget. No pens or caps at this one. What they did have were these Hive Stickers and wristbands. After studying multiple photos of the Hive stall I had to ask the question to one of the attendees who confirmed to me this was the merch.
So my question is how come Valueplan or us as a community spent 6874.00 HBD for this event for stickers and wristbands. Surely they only came to a couple of hundred HBD at the most, no?? Surely a few stickers only cost a few pence. My question to @arlettemsalase is what did she do with the rest of the 6874.00 HBD spent on Hive merch for the Blockchain Rio? I will ask the project managers what kind of receipt or invoices they received for this merch. Did they receive a receipt for tshirts, pens and caps. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of posting around these events are on purpose!
I await your reply @arlettemsalase. You have been shy so far in my questioning. Surely there is a valid reason for this and it can be all sorted out.
A Call for Caps on Funding per User.
Valueplan is essentially a marketing budget run by amateurs and the funds go to amateurs.
Now this is not to make fun of anyone. We mostly all have day jobs. With the exception of the rally car where we look like we have a professional driver and wing man at the helm, we are essentially giving all of Hives marketing funding to people who have no marketing experience whatsoever. In fairness to the project managers , they cannot be down in South America to make sure every penny is spent properly. They give the funding in good faith and hope that the funds are used where they are meant to. Well that is what I hope anyway. Now with traditional business and politics, there is misuse of funds but in crypto it is like the wild west so obviously there will be more of an element of misusing funds. Now I would be all for handing the Hive marketing over to the marketing professionals and leave the project managers manage receiving the metrics from one of the big 5 marketing companies in the world. It would save them a headache so I am not sure why they are so adamant not to do it. Year to date we are spending around $1 million which is more than enough to make us major clients for a renowned marketing company. The highly reputable ones cannot afford to have a bad image so they work hard to promote their clients. Competitions , Tiktok campaigns, Strategic product placement such as billboards and working in the web3 space for onboarding would be some of the ways these companies could work for us. The metrics they give back are top class. But for some reason Hive does not want to go this way. They said they tried it. I don't know if they went to the top marketing companies. So we are the way we are but I do not think that Hive want to put all their eggs in one basket. Spending 20% of our total outlay on the rally car is not spreading your risk. If the rally car is not bring us a decent ROI then we are goosed. But on saying that when I look down the list I do not see any projects that excite me on a marketing level which is why I am calling for a cap on funding for users outside the project team. There is just too much room for misuse of funds that are important for our blockchain and we are spending money like we are in peak bull run territory. The most amount of money that Valueplan should be capped at is 10,000k per user. I think the user that gets funded should have some kind of stake in Hive as well. We are giving money to people with less than $100 in their total account value. If you want funding then show some commitment to Hive. If Hive goes belly up and tanks then these people have nothing to lose. Laptop closed. Oh well, it was good while it lasted. The Hive middle class have built up their HP over the years and who post regularly, the @tarazkp's , @bozz & @cryptoandcoffee's of the world , and other users some of who do not even know that Valueplan exists wonder why the Hive price is tanking who have a considerable amount of HP and skin in the game will be the ones who suffer. I am not sure how the upper class are not taking more of an interest in this actually. It's all very strange.
I powered down recently such was my shock on the amount of spending that I felt 0.45 cent was the highest that Hive could get to. In hindsight I was right to do so. I will do what I always do and post regularly and just let the HP build up again but I was eager not to get burnt and have something to show for the last 4 years of posting. Valueplan has made me want to power down, not power up and a couple of years ago I would have been totally against that. It's extremely demotivating to see some of these numbers heading straight to FIAT. Hive surely can't keep going like this or can we??
Septembers Valueplan figures next month again guys. I hope you found the info helpful.
There really needs to be more transparency in this funding, I'm not asking the people involved directly give us receipts, that's fine if it stays with the people behind valueplan due to security issues and doxxing, but after the fact we need to know how much was spent on what since we're all paying for this.
Now this next part is just something I noticed and may not mean much, but looking at a certain user in that list who was quite active daily posting up until they received funding from valueplan for some sponsorships and instantly stopped posting it really doesn't come off well. Feels like vp, which I've been told only pays for costs, not the time of the people involved, is being taken advantage of.
If I was someone who was struggling thus posting daily to increase my stake and earn some rewards and I received funding from VP to run a sponsorship or something in my area, I don't see why I would suddenly stop posting unless I somehow took part of those funds which now means I don't need to grind post rewards any longer.
Not trying to accuse anyone of anything here (there may after all be countless of other irl or price reasons for that lack of activity) but things like these really make it hard to believe that everything's being run fairly, especially without more details on costs.
Thanks for the comment @acidyo . As always you hit the nail on the head. Why post and earn $5 when you get $5000. If anything they should be posting more and then sharing that post on X to increase their exposure for better marketing. The comment from one of the disgruntled street work out crew was interesting. I queried last month why the cost of merch was crazy. Turns out if you post in their community you get different kits/ uniforms Gold level , silver level etc. And we are paying for it.
I wanna point out that I don't want my comment to lead into a witchhunt of who I meant and that the reason they stopped posting can be a number of other reasons. I just want to bring awareness that it's important to split up the payments and place transparent notes on each.
Not a 7k hbd payment saying vague things like "conference, merch, trip", but being transparent about what was spent on what exactly.
It is weird to me that VP says people aren't being paid for their time, assuming these people are just doing it for the love of hive/their own stake, but then having a big lack of transparency on things others could verify. I'd rather we have more transparency and pay people for their time than wonder if they're making up for the latter by cheating the program which just causes drama and distrust in the whole project + hive itself since it's one of the biggest and only DHF funding for things like this.
And I honestly think we need more programs like this, some improved versions that tackle the whole marketing in different ways that can bring more results or at least proof of effort and effectiveness than VP and leo proposals have.
Absolutely not. Valueplan is publicly funded by every Hive stakeholder, and everyone that pays for these promotions has the right to see how their money was spent.
Tell you what. You pay me $100k/mth and trust me to spend it wisely on.. stuff. You won't do that (even though I've never once sold even a single Hive token, which is publicly available information) so it's neither reasonable to tell Hive users to do so.
There's no security risk to accounting information. No one's SSN or residential address is part of the receipts for expenditures undertaken to promote Hive. That's a ridiculous insinuation, and everyone that has ever hired an accountant knows that.
We need to see the receipts we paid for.
But why am I the only dope questioning the costs? What am I missing?
You are not the only one.
It feels like Hive is on the brink of the abyss and that is sad. A terrible idea with such a small user base to spend so much funding on amateurs who seem to have little to no idea what they are doing. If you want to do something about marketing and fund it, at least ask for complete accountability for the community. We're all paying for this! We can take action with complete accountability if it does not achieve the desired results. If you do not want that, then spend it on a company that is known to know what they are doing. As it is now, it costs a lot of money and the results are not forthcoming. How many new users has the value plan funding generated so far, and better yet, how many new investments has it generated so far? @themarkymark can you run some data for this?
I agree completely. I would say it is hard to get metrics on the projects. Take the Bike Racing for example that we have funded 20,000 HBD Year to Date. I have not seen any posts around this on the platform and ended up going to Instagram to find it. The funds go to a @victorwallet and he is involved in the Street Workout Crew. I don't see a thriving motorbike community on Hive. The rally car Community has 4 active users and 2 of them are the drivers. 😂
It’s disproportionate in every way. I almost want to say, “Give me a job where I can do my hobby (drive a rally car, biking and street workout), where I get paid thousands of dollars a month and don’t have to account for anything, and even better, don’t have to show any results.” No boss will offer me a job on those terms. Yet that’s exactly what we do here at Hive. Have we all become “do-gooders” as a community?
That’s what it looks like for the community right now, in my opinion. A “value plan” where a ridiculous amount of money is going with no results and no accountability for what happens to the money. Well, maybe there is accountability ... but not to the ones who are paying for this, the community!
And worse, a Hive price of less than 17 cents, with no real prospect of improvement. And a debt that could destroy the entire blockchain. I'd say, it's not looking great.
I don't think there are any visible metrics to determine how many and if they on boarded or brought in any investors. From what I have seen in general and with other projects, it's clear the answer is near zero.
Although I don't think I've left a comment before, I think these posts you write are incredibly valuable to gain some insights in where the money is going. You seem to tag the people involved every time, with little or no response to clarify.
This raises some eyebrows because if they're all about Hive and promoting it, how the heck aren't they actively responding to comments when someone is curious about how they're project is doing? I would say if this is a success, they are happy to share more info with the community.
Please keep doing what you're doing!
Thanks for your comment . That’s what I thought too @thisismylife . I have only got a response from @blackheart1 so far and I was happy with his response and the photos of some thing he was doing. I would prefer if he posted but at least he got back to me.
I agree, for transparency it's much better for them to have a dedicated account with monthly updates for example as not everyone curious about progress will read this comment here.
It's good people start to question things and ask questions about where the funds go, I was also guilty at not paying attention to the DHF until recent talks, since I did, I voted the return proposal as I figured this is the best thing I can do.
$44K for Venezuelans to buy lattes, bargain.
Lattes are very tasty.
Some of us did not receive even that
I never got a latte either. I have to laboriously make my own, inferior, coffee of a morning.
That's downright atrocious! It would be one thing if we had tons of users streaming onto the platform, but we don't. I'd like to see numbers on how many new accounts were created in the last month. That might be a good way to break down what is being spent versus the return we are getting on these funds. I have a feeling the numbers would be equally disappointing.
@arcange just published this for that:
https://peakd.com/hive-133987/@arcange/hive-statistics-202408-en
Your number work would put even McGarnicle to shame! Considering the market conditions, the DHF should be scaling back spending and not increasing imo. Under the old HBD debt ratio, we would already have lost HBD to Hive convertability (soft peg 9%) and hit the actual depeg a few times too.
You inside knowledge would put Jordan Belfort to shame . How do you know these things?
When waiting between Splinterlands games, I am surfing on Hive eating M&Ms.
I do think that things have to change and attitudes of those receiving sponsorships should be more open and forthcoming with the progress. Wouldn't you want to share what you are doing with the community? I just find it baffling and strange that those who are signing off on the HIVE are keeping quiet and not demanding updates. Maybe they get the updates and those are kept from the community which is also wrong. Questions are being asked and if they are not being answered there is a reason for that. Maybe I will do a post this weekend because everyone is being way too nice.
Hi @blanchy, As you have already noticed that I'm no blogger but I do send regular updates to GP, one of the project managers of VP and then VP compiles all the data and publishes it through a post later from what I understand. But I'll definitely try to make a post with all the details of all the events that I have done so far in India.
Quick short answers to the questions you have asked -
For hackathons, you can join the Code Hive discord and keep yourself updated on it.
Here are some of the projects that were built on Hive :
https://ecency.com/hive/@ansh115/hivejam-a-decentralised-music-streaming
https://ecency.com/buildwithdelhi/@hariprasadd/introducing-greenpulse-empowering-sustainability-with
https://ecency.com/vihaan/@divijmahajan2004/ticket-hive
https://ecency.com/vihaan007/@intellihire/intellihire
https://ecency.com/vihaan/@ishanchugh/completion-of-medwise-your-complete
https://ecency.com/vihaan/@lucirace/introducing-hivestar-an-image-sharing
Sinusoid is another hackathon that will be happening in November. 90 days will be given to the student developers to learn about Hive chain and deploy a project on it.
FinFarm is a Youtube channel. They are making tutorial videos for the Indian population who are into crypto and blockchain related things. They give tasks and do giveaways in HBD. And they are also promoting Hive in their podcast series.
Here are some pictures :
For investors' meet, I'll need some more time to publish a post on that.
Hi @blackheart1 thanks for your reply. I like the photos and the idea of hackathons as you are reaching the target market that Hive needs and I can now get a sense of what you are doing now. You are ranked number 5 YTD of highest funded this year so I hope you understand my questions. Do you not think the Hive Community deserve to know seeing that you have been funded over 68,000 HBD for your project to promote Hive yet 0 posts around anything?? Surely you could muster a few posts no matter how much you don't like writing that are explaining how the events went and just add the Finfarm video links. I think the Community deserve this. It looks very shady otherwise. You can give your feedback to Valueplan all you want but the Community doesn't see it. It only sees the costs. I will look into the FinFarm. Thanks for your reply and getting back to me. Cheers.
I appreciate you providing this information. I took a cursory look at the Hivestar link, because I found it an interesting idea. The post author upvoted himself 100% (for $0.00), Ecency voted a nice $4.469, and the 13 other votes amounted to ~$.02. Strangely 9 of those 13 voters all voted at 9.5%, a specific weight that suggests all those accounts are bots controlled by one user. Is @contestbox your account? If not, why didn't you upvote the post, or comment on it? It would seem very little effort went into encouraging @lucirace to participate on Hive if you didn't even upvote or comment on his post announcing Hivestar.
I haven't looked at any of the accounts that voted on that post, to see if they post or regularly curate content on Hive. I'll bet you they don't, though, because they don't have substantial stake, and none of them commented on the post.
IMG source - peakd.com
The only comment on the post was from Hivebuzz, congratulating the OP for receiving 10 upvotes in his Hive career, and letting him know his next goal was receiving 50 upvotes. @lucirace only posted a couple tests before that post, and has never posted again. They have never received that next badge from Hivebuzz for receiving 50 upvotes.
Hivestar seems a neat idea, and while I haven't tried it to see if it even works, it looks well done in the post about it. But, as far as marketing Hive and bringing new users onboard, it doesn't seem to be a remarkable success. Other than Ecency, the creator, and the bots, there were only 4 other votes for the post, much less a flood of signups. Can you provide the cost of the hackathon at which Hivestar was the winner, please? It seems to have failed to even onboard the developer that won the prize and coded Hivestar. Are you aware of anyone that has signed up and become a Hive user as a result of these hackathons? I searched vihaan, because 4 of the links you provided above had that in them. I found a post from @mayank18 about it, with a 3speak video and everything. It was @mayank18's only post on Hive ever. I noticed you didn't upvote that post or comment on it either, so gave them no encouragement to participate on Hive. You say you're not a blogger, and you don't seem to curate the content resulting from your hackathons, nor comment encouragingly.
Every now and then I slap a level on whatever I'm building to check my work. You're working to onboard new users to Hive. How do you check your work, and show us you're on the level?
Thanks!
Hi @valued-customer, I'm painfully aware that the retention is next to 0 for these developers as they choose to submit a project, win the prize money and then leave the project in whichever state it was in and take part in some other hackathon.
To avoid these things to happen again, I have already taken appropriate steps. Any future hackathon will release prizes in phases. The developers would have to show their progress and post about it. Once they do, a part of their prize amount will be released. This will help in retention of the developers.
Not only this, our Hive documentation was totally out-dated. This created a lot of problems in development as well as retention. To deal with this, a lot things were done. You can check the DHF proposals to understand it a bit better.
Unfortunately, my upvote doesn't carry much value. I only recently powered up a little. But I do ask GK (from ecency) to vote those posts. That's the upvote you are seeing. I only recently got in touch with @acidyo and I'll be sharing such post links in OCD as well so that they can get some better curation.
Also, I'm physically present in all these hackathons and interact with all the teams that try to build on Hive chain. They tell me their idea and I try to guide them as to how they can build their vision on our chain. Hivestar was one of those projects.
And then, I have a 30 mins call with all the winning teams individually after the hackathon is concluded, where I tell them more about Hive, what they can do with their winnings (HBD savings, further development of their project, etc) and how they can continue to grow on Hive. But I can't force them to stay.
You should understand that onboarding is not the only goal of all the events we are doing in India. No one knew about Hive here. So conducting such events is putting our name out there. Handing out merch to the attendees makes sure that they remember us. These events are increasing our footprint and our network in India is getting stronger day by day.
The investor meet was a result of all these events. No one would have given us an ear had they not seen us in all these events.
For the costing, you can check the transactions from VP to my account. It varies from event to event. The number of participants, the sponsorship amount, the publicity we get out of it, the merch, etc are all variables.
I did find this post very helpful. I appreciate your hard work and diligence researching this account and reaching out to recipients for receipts.
We need receipts. Posts are great too, but we need receipts.
Thanks!
I would even go further than this. I used to make funding bids myself to people that would give out money to well meaning projects. I would make it milestones and targets based. Milestone not reached? Then there better be a good excuse or no money is given from that point.
As I found out last bull market you can't just give out money to people willy nilly with no expectations and a wish they will do what they said they would because it's never the case.
I'd also look at funding more 1st world projects as well because ultimately (and it sucks that it is this way) but those are the guys that bring the big bux to the chain so the little guys can earn lots from.
The way this is handled really winds me up the wrong way because it seems 99% of people on this chain agree with you, but no-one can stop it.
It’s simple does any of that returns more to hive ? No ! I believe the return is not even zero it’s negative !
I agree with you there.
I think 100,000,000 may be a bit too much :P
Good point!
You were born for this accounting stuff.
This post has been manually curated by @bhattg from Indiaunited community. Join us on our Discord Server.
Do you know that you can earn a passive income by delegating your Leo power to @india-leo account? We share 100 % of the curation rewards with the delegators.
100% of the rewards from this comment goes to the curator for their manual curation efforts. Please encourage the curator @bhattg by upvoting this comment and support the community by voting the posts made by @indiaunited.
Lovely country India . Always loved it.
It's so sad seeing so much money spent and so few results... but above all it's very sad seeing so little information on how that money are being spent.
I have some questions: who decides how the funds of the Valueplan are spent? And how it is funded? With a DHF proposal or something different?
Valueplan apply to the DHF for funding. It has large whale backing so it gets through every time without any carfuffel. Project managers then decide what to do with the funds. Ya gotta love decentralisation eh.
I don't personally think that's an issue, big stakeholders want the best of hive as they're proportionally paying for a lot of it in a way. We need to see more proposals from trusted people bringing in verifiable proofs that there was an attempt at it at least and where effort and time was spent, if that doesn't get funded or attempted then you could start thinking there's something weird going on, but again I don't see that happening here.
I think it's potentially more the process of it and trust being placed on the wrong people partially to do the work on top of the ideas themselves being outdated/inefficient for a project as small as Hive with its funding range.
I don't want to trust anybody.
I want to see receipts.
I don't think we need any marketing beyond the content created on Hive being well rewarded. Folks searching on topics our creators write about will see posts where the authors got paid by their audience for writing it.
That's all the marketing plan we need.
but we need to end the unrestrained taxation of content creators for any reason but spam, scams, or plagiarism, and particularly the forever flagging that eliminates all rewards a creator is allocated by curators if they have made just one post that was problematic. Flagging that problem post is fine. Flagging that author until they grovel before the Lords of Hive is bass ackwards marketing, because the market for Hive will see such 100% taxation on posts and rightly avoid Hive because of it, because it's unfair to the curators and the creators to have good posts defunded, and taxation is theft, which should be reserved for violations of the NAP like spam, scams, and continued plagiarism - and posting to multiple platforms isn't plagiarism.
DV's are taxes. I'm agin' 'em, except as undertaken to prevent spam, scams, and plagiarism.