Please spread the word: there are 0 economic rewards—currently or in the future—for running a Hub.

Only run a Hub if you:
1. Find it fun
2. Find it useful for your project or your business

There's no surprise or gotcha that comes later.

All of the YouTube video tutorials are lying to you about a potential reward.

Ok so who gets the storage fees i pay? Isn’t a lack of incentive for hubs going to cause centralization? 

Email is an open protocol but it’s centralized around just a few providers because there is no incentives baked in to the protocol.

On Hubs

1. We've said from the beginning, people will run Hubs without direct economic incentives. This has proven correct. 10K+ Hubs on the network.

2. This number is artificially high as there are likely many Hub operators hoping for a future economic reward. There will not be a reward.

3. Rewards don't make sense as there's no good way to prove that a Hub was honest and performant for a long period of time. Any deterministic system tied to an economic reward would create an incentive for fraud to fake running a Hub to get paid.

3. This is why Bitcoin and Ethereum do not pay node operators. Economic rewards are independent from running a node. Coinbase ran BTC / ETH nodes for years (pre-staking).

4. Our original goal was get to ~100 independent, good Hubs. Given network size, activity, number of companies building on Farcaster, seems like that number is achievable between 1) companies with an economic interest in access to the network and 2) altruistic individuals for hobbyist or ideological reasons.

Incentives are key. Decentralized systems thrive when contributors are rewarded directly for their participation. Let's hope future protocols address this.