With Q1 almost entirely behind us its time to think about Q2. We are focusing on completing this review and Q2 budget considerations ahead of our 4th Hive Anniversary which is due to take place on March 20th.
Many of the events are currently in progress and it's premature to do an overview of their successes but we can say with confidence that all activities are progressing well. We will keep this post and proposal purely administrative.
Overview [R]
Your Value Plan keyholders as always are @theycallmedan, @smooth, @guiltyparties, @crimsonclad and @blocktrades. Project management is carried out by @crimsonclad and @guiltyparties.
The project scope includes promotional, marketing, impact and task-based activities that support Hive and its ecosystem as a whole. Activities may be major or minor. Project costs such as logistics and merchandise fit within the scope.
We take project management and quality control very seriously. All line items are continuously scrutinized and we employ a cyclical feedback model of communication.
[R]=Repost section for your information.
New Management Pilot: Plug-In Proposals
We are exploring the possibility of creating 'plug-in proposals' to further leverage Hive consensus where select individual deliverables will see their own proposals on the DHF. The proposal funding would still feed into Value Plan where the proposals pass the return proposal value. The purpose of these is not so much to pass that return proposal but to inspire independent voting and discussion. Each proposal will show the community members who supported it. As plug-in proposals do not actually fully rely on being funded, there is a possibility to evaluate their merit based on the number of voters rather than the influence of stakeholders, which has the added value of gauging consensus without the votes belonging to keyholders.
Where the plug-in proposal passes the return proposal and gains funding, that amount of funding will likely be refunded by Value Plan at the end of the quarter it belongs in. All of this is still in the early stages of development and has not been tested in practice.
The New Hive Rally 3
A large portion of the expenditure in the Q1 budget was the new rally car, a Rally 3, a 4wd model that is suitable for racing to a higher standard and on more courses than the previous version. The Rally 3 is presently being procured for a total of 105k Euro, which is a significant discount of 200-250k Euro which is the average for these vehicles.
It's important to mention that one of the transactions had a mistake on the Value Plan end (issued by @guiltyparties) which was caught by Slaven and processed properly. The mistake was sending 31k in HBD rather than in HIVE. Normally, approximately 10k HBD is issued a day for accounting reasons. in this case, however, we ended up with an amount of three days in one. There was no change to the project and all that happened was the 105k was reached earlier. Notably, all Value Plan projects have two if not more levels of project managers for the purpose of catching any errors.
The current car which was purchased over a year ago is going to be sold at the end of this season. It was originally purchased for 60k Euro, 20k of which came from the sale of its predecessor owned by Slaven. We are hoping it will sell for a good amount as these vehicles are specialized and retain their value fairly well. The sale is scheduled for the end of the season (Sept-Oct) in order to have a spare for the duration of this year.
Should any unexpected difficulties arise from the purchase of the new vehicle which would prevent said purchase, the funds will instead be used for this season's races going forward. This is due to the challenges in converting HIVE/fiat. Hopefully everything will keep on going as planned and the vehicle will be ours soon. At this time, we just received notification that the purchase is progressing well and all the paperwork has been approved.
The Hive Rally Car and team competed in the most prestigious of all the WRC races, the WRC Monte Carlo, in Monaco this January. It was an excellent race with a lot of fanfare and publicity. It was also the first time that Hive was presented in Monaco in any form.
Our next WRC races are the Croatia Rally, 18-21 April, and the Vodafone Rally de Portugal, 9-12 May.
Following Goals
As many Value Plan projects move into their second full year, they are facing deliverables that must be met in order for the project to be seen as a success. The deliverables are tailored to each major project.
| Project | Deliverable | 2024 Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Water and social impact projects | Efficient service delivery | Publicity in research papers, recognition of NGOs, publicity through joint partnerships and events |
| Rally and motorcycle racing | Professional performance and representation of Hive | Increase in media exposure, including across socials, interviews |
| Bike racing | Professional performance and representation of Hive | Partnerships with industry brands to encourage business use of Hive |
| SWC | High-quality events representing Hive | Promotion of Hive in Colombia, focusing on investors and potential builders, social media representation, reducing costs through partnerships |
| Education projects | Inspiring youth to explore STEM through Hive | Local publicity, recognition of academia |
| B2B (Sucre) | Onboarding businesses to transact in HBD | Exploring remote onboarding, reducing costs, focusing on sustainability |
| Conferences | Visibility, partnerships and listings | Secure invites to speak at conferences |
| Hackathons and niche promotions | Outstanding, professional events | Showcase Hive technology, expand utility of Hive, encourage building on Hive |
These goals did not shift much from last year and so far everyone who contributed to these projects has done their utmost to ensure the best possible result and to save on costs where possible.
Submitting Ideas to Value Plan
To submit your idea for a VP project or initiative or if you know of an opportunity that would be a good fit, simply reply to one of the posts and let us know. The idea that you submit does not need to be a project that you yourself wish to undertake and it can just be simply a strategic point to take into account going forward. All ideas are always welcome.
Those with businesses that accept HIVE and HBD do have a budget allocated for Hive merchandise for their business. Simply let us know here in comments or any of the chats so we can help you get set up. Hive-branded merchandise such as cups or banners and double-branded merchandise such as staff uniforms are fully covered by Value Plan as it is the intention of this budget to assist the businesses that wish to champion Hive in doing so.
Onboarding
Originally, Value Plan did not onboard. This is because of some stakeholder concerns over onboarding non-investors. However, times have changed and onboarding content creators and general users of every type is now seen as a key priority.
The conference onboarding platform was open sourced and is awaiting some improvements. It can be found here. Everyone is encouraged to make full use of the repo and incorporate it into your frontends or just make custom onboarding sites out of it. The backend will see more flexibility in the near future in how these accounts are made. Right now they are created out of free accounts but going forward they will be shifted to a burn model where funds from the DHF will be used. Developers are highly encouraged to fork the repo and further develop it as you see fit. The purpose of this type of onboarding is to support that "it only takes a few seconds to get a Hive account" so please do keep that in mind when using the code.
Proposal Q2
We are presently working on a number of events and activities in addition to planning a great Hive Anniversary.
We are asking for 300,000 HBD for Q2, which should also cover some of the conferences in the fall.
https://peakd.com/proposals/300
Thank you for your consideration,
~ The Value Plan Team
$10,000 per day so someone can race around Monte Carlo in a car is not a value plan, it's a luxury plan. As for the other random events they seem to be mostly happening in select countries.
What has the impact of the value plan been on users growth over the past year or two and the growth of Hive? I see most new users cashing out and giving up once the upvotes go away. Asking for $300,000 without a breakdown is a little too much to consider. Not this time.
Sorry
Value Plan activities happen in countries where we have willing community members to develop activities and broaden our reach. There are some countries where we simply can't operate. The number of countries is expanding. The fact that we got into this Monaco race is monumental as it is; last year about half the participants were cut. We are showing Hive as a brand and promoting it as a place to build on. Aside from the focal points of the car and other activities we also have a strong b2b infrastructure and numerous invitations to conferences, which we never had before. We spoke about this before.
The impact mostly lies in the promotional reach for Hive. Until recently, VP had regular onboarding out of scope because at its inception there were stakeholder concerns over the value of users who are not investors. That is now picking up and we are finding many onboarding gaps, so much so that the conference platform which you see above had to be made. It is now being used for other activities.
VP has a minimum of $1,200,000 annual budget, or 10% of all current hive inflation expected for 2024! (including all author and curator inflation.) Is the DHF decentralized when a few individuals (some of whom are witnesses and large stake holders) control the decision making for spending 10% of the entire blockchains' inflation?
A potential investor may wish to know if the VP (marketing) team is qualified and how effective their prior experience managing such budgets has been? How is their performance measured and what was the criteria (governance) used to select the Value Plan Team besides surpassing the return proposal in the DAO?
The lack of transparency in evaluating the effectiveness of past VP sponsorship performance in adding value to Hive is a cause for further concern. The VP is sponsoring those who are willing to develop activities in countries where you can operate but how effective is this versus just reaching out to people over the web and running virtual events? I understand your 'monumental' appreciation for rally cars but is that the best place to reach out to movers and shakers in the web 3.0 community? How does the impact of spending $100,000 on a rally car compare to spending $100,000 on another sport sponsorship?
Is purchasing T-shirts, physical banners and sponsoring select minor events in an expanding number of countries the best use of funds versus buying clicks where we know the viewers are already interested in web 3.0? How much expertise and budget is available for promoting Hive online? I'm sure we've tried this but when was the last time and where was it tried? Have we tried again? Are you using an online marketing professional who has experience in web 2.0 advertising and promotion? Again what is the selection criteria of that individual?
I am just asking questions that any potential investor doing proper due diligence would ask. This is called the value plan which implies there is value, how so? Considering Hive used to be a top blockchain project and is now sitting in the mid 300's for market cap, we have to wonder, is putting 10% of all inflation into the hands of a select group of individuals who may not be marketing and financial professionals appropriate?
I say this as professional in evaluating budgets, making financial plans and helping with the management of large sums of money. I've also managed e-commerce advertising campaigns and evaluated them over a number of years so I know how difficult this can be. Are we able to get a performance report and future evaluation criteria from a proposal asking for 10% of all inflation? If not do you require help making one?
I hope you can at least understand the need for such a thing.
Let me address these separately in a post if you don't mind.
Thank you for this clear out plan for the various proponents to take.
To add, on which this may or may not be included to the above general layout plan, hoping to see more crypto exchanges be opened to us, specially Filipinos or to any other communities where large number of Hive users are concentrated.
We, our community, is very much eager to see that 1 or 2 of our local CEX includes Hive or HBD on their platforms.
I truly support onboarding efforts to the network, looking for more gems that will cascade the ever increasing goal of the network and all its communities.
-guruvaj
DBuzz and HivePh