When your Hub upgrades, you'll be prompted to ack a message saying that there are no rewards for running a Hub. 

Over 10k people have been tricked into running hubs by youtube videos promising (fake) rewards. This change will discourage those users from running Hubs, which in turn will give us more headroom to scale.

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

what if you had to lock up like few hundred dollars of ETH to stand up a hub? 
no slashing. no rewards. you'll get your funds back whenever you want. still permissionless. 
just add a financial barrier.

so you think if hubs were required to stake $200 in order to run, these farmers would still run their hubs?

The challenge here is that thousands of hubs were created, with the false hope of airdrops, at a net loss every month. The ability to deposit and withdraw funds may not deter the bad behavior we're trying to prevent