The answer to why rewards are only given in Hive and not also HBD

I was just looking through my rewards history and to one of my last posts I observed that I only got Hive and Hive Power for it, even if I set to receive the rewards as 50% HBD and 50% Hive power. For an article where the rewards were valued at $3.652, the author rewards allocated were $1.829 which actually resulted in 15.252 Hive Power and 15.246 Hive. As we can see there is no HBD rewards for it, even if according to my settings I should get half of that in it. But why that happens? The answers stands in the HBD debt ratio which because of the Hive price and the HBD supply and spending, is extremely high - thus the HBD print rate got to 0% (effectively disabled). Let's see some math explaining that as of today.

The current situation (April 2026) on the Hive blockchain is as following:

• HBD supply ≈ 33 million
• HIVE market cap ≈ ~32 million USD (at ~$0.058–0.06)

This puts the HBD debt ratio extremely high (around or above the critical threshold).

And now let's see the result on the HBD print rate:

• HBD print rate: ~0% (effectively disabled)

What this means?

The Hive blockchain is not printing new HBD right now and all “50% HBD payouts” are being converted into liquid HIVE instead. This is exactly why we received HIVE + HP, and not any HBD cents making the HBD payments effectively 0%.

And to understand the mechanics behind this is because Hive reduces HBD creation when:

• The debt ratio approaches ~10% → starts reducing
• Near ~30% → HBD printing goes to 0%

With current numbers, Hive is in that protection zone, so no new HBD is issued. At least for rewards, while I believe that for HBD Savings the interest is still paid in HBD. If that becomes a problem, probably we will see the HBD Savings APR moving down from the current level of 14%. While I benefit this rate, I think that if it would be lowered to 10% (which I find it still acceptable), maybe would bring more benefits for the Hive ecosystem.

It is clear that the Hive blockchain is affected hard by this bear market and I see a lot of long standing users already silent (I might be one of them myself as well). In the same time there is a feeling that the few powerful one are still benefiting of this ecosystem instead of trying to improve the tokenomics and make them healthier. This created a loss in confidence and more and more projects are closing down, even if myself I keep the hope for it. But that's not enough and the numbers don't lie... something needs to be done or this ecosystem will slowly disappear. I hope of the last hour wakeup from the big whales and to take some drastic decision on how Hive funds are spent in order to make this ecosystem healthier and one that attract users and new projects. The flame of hope is still burning, but we need to do something about it.

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