Keeping Ecency Running: An Honest Update on Funding and Service Changes

For years, Ecency has worked to give the Hive community a fast, reliable and feature rich way to explore, create and earn on the blockchain. Behind the app you use every day is a large amount of infrastructure: web servers in multiple regions, a full Hive node, image hosting, search, notifications and more. All of it costs real money every month.

We want to be transparent with you about where we stand.

The funding reality

Our Hive proposal is currently not funded. Together with app revenue that does not fully cover our operating costs, this leaves us with a growing monthly shortfall. We have kept everything running by absorbing the difference ourselves, but that is not sustainable for much longer.

Rather than let quality quietly slip or put the whole service at risk, we are making deliberate, responsible decisions about what we keep and what we can no longer afford. The first priority in every one of these decisions is keeping the main Ecency app online and working for everyone.

What we are changing now

Shutting down our dedicated Hive node. Ecency has run its own full Hive node (hapi.ecency.com) to power the app quickly and reliably and to give back to the ecosystem as a public API endpoint that anyone could use. Running a full node is one of our most expensive line items. We are shutting it down and moving fully to public Hive API nodes, the same shared infrastructure many other apps rely on.

To do this without hurting your experience, we rebuilt how the app talks to Hive nodes. It now detects slow or rate limited nodes and routes around them automatically, in real time, so a bad node no longer slows you down. Most of you should notice no difference. If you or your application were pointing to hapi.ecency.com directly, please switch to another public node.

Retiring our Asia web server. Ecency ran regional web servers so pages load quickly close to you. We are retiring the Asia server and visitors in Asia and Oceania are now served from our European and US servers. Thanks to caching at the network edge, most pages stay fast. Some first time page loads in that region may be slightly slower than before.

What may come next

We want to be honest with you: if funding does not improve, these will not be the last changes. The services most at risk, roughly in the order we would be forced to consider them, are:

• Image hosting. Storing and serving the millions of images across Hive is one of our largest ongoing costs in both storage and bandwidth. Your images are safe and already proxied by images.hive.blog along with our own images.ecency.com for now, we will think of ways to decomisionning step by step/safely.

• Search. Full text search across posts and accounts.

• Other supporting services. Parts of notifications, analytics and background processing.

If we reach that point, our commitment is simple. We will reduce everything else before we let the core Ecency website and app go offline. Keeping the front door open for the community comes first.

How you can help

Ecency is powered by this community and the community can keep it strong:

• Support the Ecency proposal. Voting for our Hive proposal is the single most impactful thing you can do. https://ecency.com/proposals/379

• Use the paid features you value. Boosting posts, promotions, buying and spending Points and Premium all directly fund operations.

• Delegate Hive Power to @ecency to strengthen the account and its rewards.

• Spread the word. Invite others, share your work and help grow the community that sustains all of this.

We are not going anywhere

None of this changes our commitment to Hive or to you. We are working hard to make every remaining dollar go further and to keep Ecency fast and dependable even on a leaner setup. We would much rather tell you honestly what we are facing than pretend everything is fine.

Thank you for being part of Ecency. With your support, we will keep building.

Status: https://status.ecency.com

Transparency: https://trust.ecency.com

The Ecency Team