State of Hive in Mid-2026

in Actifit3 days ago

image.png

Introduction

Over the last few weeks I built and updated multiple Hive
dashboards
to stop
guessing and start measuring what is happening on Hive. After looking
across all of them together, I think the current state of Hive is
clear:

Hive is very resilient and productive, but distribution and
participation trends are moving in opposite directions.

image.png

What the dashboards are showing right now

From the latest data snapshot:

  • Curator analytics tracks 8,956 curators, 858,531 payout events, and
    about 246,660 HP earned in the latest week.
  • Curator voting allocation (top 100 view) shows 24,156 weekly rows of
    data historically.
  • In the latest week (2026-07-06), those top 100 accounts earned
    191,186.793 HP in curation.
  • Concentration trend has moved from Gini 0.7263 (2018) to 0.7981 (latest).
  • Top 10 Curator share moved from 31.32% to 43.25%.
  • Top 100 Curator share moved from 75.73% to 81.72%.
  • Authors dashboard currently shows a total of 2,082 rewarded authors
    in the latest 7-day window.
  • Weekly active authors trend in 2025-2026 declined from 4,264 to
    2,109 by the latest week.

image.png

My read on this

  1. Hive is not weak. Hive is efficient.
    When I look at witness, curation, and payout pipelines, I see a chain
    that keeps producing.
    Even in changing market conditions, Hive keeps doing what it was
    designed to do: settle value and reward participation without
    centralized gatekeepers.

  2. Curation is getting more concentrated.
    The concentration charts are not subtle anymore.
    An increase of almost 12 percentage points in top-10 share over the
    long window is meaningful.
    This does not automatically mean something is broken, but it does mean
    influence is clustering harder around larger and more optimized
    actors.

  3. Author participation is where we should focus.
    The biggest concern in my view is not technical uptime or reward
    mechanics. It is sustained author breadth, if active author counts
    trend down while curation power concentrates, discovery and onboarding
    become more fragile over time.

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What I think we should do next as a community

  • Improve discovery of new and mid-tier creators so visibility is not
    winner-take-all.
  • Build more curator diversity tooling, including strategy visibility
    and delegation transparency.
  • Keep pushing high-frequency analytics so we react early, not six months late.
  • Reward consistency and retention, not only breakout posts.
  • Continue supporting witnesses and builders who ship public tools and data.

Final thought

I am optimistic about Hive.
The chain works. The tooling ecosystem is growing. The data is available.
That is a strong foundation.

But if we want the next growth phase to be healthy, we need to treat
participation breadth as a first-class KPI, not a side metric.

I will keep publishing these dashboards and improving them so we can
all make better decisions with evidence, not vibes.


If my tools are useful to you, I would appreciate your witness vote
support: https://vote.hive.uno/@seattlea

If you prefer your Hive Witnesses to never power down I am one of
those Hive Witnesses. I believe that unless you are a top 20 witness
and running more than just a Hive Witness node then you don't need to
power down.


This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io


07/07/2026
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I like the positive attitude and the final thoughts... 😃 Regarding content creation and curation, I would say that the centralization of curation is one of the biggest issues... I know that some of the big curators have big teams who are doing the job, but still, having more active individuals, curating their communities, leaving meaningful comments, would be much more effective than any centralized curation project...

Also, as you stated, distribution is another big problem, mainly caused by the first one, centralized curation... There is no easy fix for that... Education, and showing by example that the real (account) growth is built on active participation, creating posts, commenting, and manual curating...

It's a bit absurd that we want to automate the whole social media aspect... Where is the "social" part in it then? 😃


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Curated by friendlymoose

Agreed, lack of authors or even users is the biggest problem for Hive. There is no social network if there is nobody you know on Hive... And the more centralized everything becomes the more pronounced it all becomes and we are trending in the wrong direction for the last five plus years...

Oh wow this is exactly what I needed to read just about now. Thank you for sharing the stats and your interpretations. I totally appreciate the suggestions too. I'm still on a bit of a break mode right now, but I do intend to get back to active posting soon. Do keep sharing your valuable insights. 🙌 happy midweek!


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This post has been curated by the Alive And Thriving Team, we curate good content in the We Are Alive Tribe that is on topic for #aliveandthriving, and it's included in our daily curation report on @aliveandthriving, plus @youarealive is following our Curation Trail.

Thank you :)

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Here is an issue with your data, it includes curation services. Curation services, while concentrate the curation, they do not concentrate the curation rewards.

Please tell me more, I would like to better understand this issue so that I can provide additional views of this data and exclude curation services. I already made some charts excluding certain curators or curation beneficiaries. But in case of distribution of curation rewards it seems that having a big picture of everything and the real authors vs things like hbd.funder or build a whale or posh token services.

ocdb, curangel, appreciator, bdvoter. These curators send the rewards they earn to people that delegate to them. I don't know all of them. There are probably some out of the top 25 as well.