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 incredibly heartfelt (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.
Last year's installment 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 le